


Olympahoma

by mahalidael



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Original Work
Genre: Gen, vaguely percy jackson related?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-31 14:02:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 26,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19427437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mahalidael/pseuds/mahalidael
Summary: some old writing, for jaimefor the love of god please help me





	1. Paul Blart Sword Cop

It all went wrong a week after my dad married his sugar mama.

My dad is an artist. He was a club bouncer a long time ago, but now he walks with a limp. I was standing at the window, peeking through the embroidered curtains, and I watched him hobble in a circle around the pickup truck. He was dressed in Sunday clothes and a nice cane that Vivian had bought him. The guest of honor was a big metal butterfly in the truck bed.

I turned away from the window and sneezed. I always sneezed in my stepmother’s house, because its interior looked like a strangely well-organized antiques warehouse. Dust was a fact of life. And now it was more obvious than ever because everything had been picked up and put in cardboard boxes.

The brochure in my left hand was for a tourist trap living history town in Oklahoma. “Here in Olympahoma, it’s 1879 all the time!” *Disclaimer: Olympahoma law enforcement claims no responsibility in the event of manslaughter by the side of I-35.

No, seriously.

Anyway, I counted nine in the living room, but there were things that weren’t packed yet. Like Vivian’s makeup.

Dad knocked on the door.

Muffled, from the ceiling: “ANNIE, GET THE DOOR! I’M SOAKING MY  _ NIP-NOPS! _ ”

I did.

My stepmother was dressed and made-up in five minutes. She says she used to be an actress in musicals, and between this and the big voice it all checks out. When she came down, her face looked like rising bread dough, the way she’d smoothed out her wrinkles.

They kissed for about a full minute while I tried not to say anything. I never understood all those jokes about newlyweds until now.

“Did you take your medicine?” Dad said. “Is my tie on backwards? No, wait. Can you even put a tie on backwards?”

“Honestly, Yan,” she said. “The way you’re running around, you’d think the house were on fire.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “I’m sorry, but you know how important this contest is.”

Vivian scoffed. “If it’s so important, why are you leaving your daughter at home?”

People call me “accident-prone,” among other things. I’ve started kitchen fires, melted microscopes, and ignited streams of hairspray. But I was determined to keep everything intact today.

“Annie’s promised she’ll be careful. Right, Annie?”

“I know where the fire extinguishers are,” I said.

“See? She’ll be fine,” Dad said.

Vivian raised her eyebrows and looked down at me. She must have seen something sincere in my eyes, because she just shrugged. “Play nice with my daughters,” she said, and walked out onto the driveway.

My dad patted me on the head. “We’ll be back tonight, okay?”

“Okay. Have fun, Dad.”

And they drove away.

I guess I should explain what Vivian meant by “play nice with my daughters.”

I have two stepsisters: Rosalie and Genevieve Fritzwilliams. They’re twins, and like most people, they sleep in on Saturday mornings.

Genevieve is an asshole, but other than that she’s easy to deal with. However, when Rosalie isn’t sleeping she’s causing trouble. Rosalie was banned from going on field trips because of her track record — as far back as first grade, she was sabotaging a trip to the Saenger by stealing the teacher’s phone, and then calling 911 when the teacher caught her.

We were each required to write an essay about the ancient Greek and Roman statues at the art museum. And because Rosalie couldn’t come, guess who had to help her?

You got it.

But it was six in the morning on a Saturday, and I had some time to myself.

At first, it was uneventful. I took out my photocopies of the Odyssey and started marking them up for the two essays that I would inevitably have to write.

After ten o’clock, I started wondering when Rosalie and Genevieve were going to wake up. I mean, I certainly wasn’t complaining, but I had been going at my homework for four hours, and I’d been staring at words for so long I was forgetting how to read. My mind wandered, and so did my stomach.

I heated up a frozen lasagna. I sat in front of the hot oven the whole time, cradling a fire extinguisher in my arms like a baby.

When I put the lasagna out, I realized something was wrong. Usually the twins would wake up for food. At least Rosalie.

There was one bedroom upstairs, and there were two signs on it. One was a framed cross-stitch that said “bless this mess.” The other was bright yellow and only said “trespassers will be shot, survivors will be shot again.” I had never been in this room before, but there’s a first time for anything.

I turned the doorknob. The door only opened a crack before stopping. With the few inches I was given, I could gather a few things about the room: it was chaotic, messy, and occupied. There was one blanketed lump on each bunk bed, dimly lit by a grape-flavored lava lamp.

I glanced up. The door was locked with a swing bar, like in a hotel. “Hey,” I said. “It’s lunchtime.”

The lumps didn’t move.

I closed the door and took the metal “trespassers will be shot” sign off. I opened the door again as far as it would go, and used the edge of the sign to jimmy the parts of the swing bar until they separated.

I climbed over the mess and made my way to the bottom bunk, and I could see a tuft of blonde hair now. I shook her. “Rosalie? Or… Genevieve?” I said hesitantly. “Whoever you are? I’ve got a lasagna! Wake up—!”

And then my stepsister’s head fell off.

I screamed. And then, shakily, I picked up the head — or “head.” At second glance, my stepsister’s severed head was actually a rubber chicken mask with a wig. I pulled back the blankets and there were only pillows.

I checked the top bunk. Same deal.

The window was unlocked.

* * *

The museum staff looked at me like they recognized me, and I’m very recognizable in a bad way. A lot of people know me in a single serving, as a twitchy little girl with funny-looking eyes.

“Didn’t I see you the other day?” the gruff security guard at the front said. He had a beard, like my dad, but unlike Dad he also had one big, thick eyebrow above his sunglasses and was almost seven feet tall. “What’s your name, little girl?”

“Um,” I said.

He just chuckled and took the offered money. He laughed in a way that bothered me, like a sadistic kid on the playground that pulled the legs off crickets. “Ah, the smart ones never talk much. Get in there.”

I scampered towards the Greek and Roman exhibit.

I remember the first time I was introduced to Greek statues in person. If my dad’s sculptures have taught me anything, it’s that there’s a big difference in seeing a picture of something and having it occupy physical space in front of you. Big blocks of rock cast in the shapes of some models who posed naked for hours to have their faces applied to gods.

Also, horses. Horses taught me that thing too. You ever seen a horse in person? Scariest thing ever, and I’m counting this in a laundry list of scary shit.

What I’m getting at is that there’s something real unnerving about walking alone through a dimly lit gallery full of bleached-out rock people. It almost felt like they could reach out and touch me.

I found them dicking around near the pottery. Rosalie was taking a selfie in front of a Greek vase, which had a guy on it who was balancing a cup on his dick. Genevieve was sitting in the corner rolling her eyes.

Genevieve Fritzwilliams is the most beautiful jerk in Alabama, which unfortunately gives her more leverage to be a jerk. If there’s any consolation for me, it’s that she’s got a pale scar across her cheek from a fight over the last cup of cafeteria pudding. Just goes to show that being pretty isn’t the solution to all of life’s problems.

Genevieve noticed me, and gave me a disapproving once-over out of the corner of her eye. “You’re wearing  _ that? _ ”

I gaped at her. “You snuck out of the house for  _ four hours  _ and that’s all you have to say to me?” I said.

“You’re wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a sweater vest,” she insisted. “What else is there to say?”

I was going to say something about how, at that very moment, she was wearing an upcycled purple snuggie, but Rosalie saw me first. She was wearing a big sweatshirt, and on the front she had written “F-BOMB” in sharpie, all caps. There was a big banjo in her hand, almost as big as me, and she strummed on it unpleasantly. “Hey, sis! Glad to see you’ve joined the fun! Can you play the banjo? I think some busker left it here.”

I think we’ve all met a Rosalie — a person who’s good and pleasant at first blush, but at second blush you realize this is one of those “bad influences” your parents told you about. Though with Rosalie, second blush might be too late, and you’re already roped into whatever scheme she’s cooking up now.

I flinched away from Rosalie’s open arms. “You’re in trouble!”

“Who’s got urine trouble?”

“You know what I meant,” I said. “We got to go home before Rosalie breaks something.”

Genevieve lowered her head and snorted. Rosalie threw her head back and laughed.

“I’m not joking! I don’t want to get in trouble! I--hey, put that thing back where you found it! That belongs to someone!”

Rosalie blew a raspberry, but she walked over to a bench on the far side of the room and slid the banjo under it. Now that I think of it, that was a really weird place to leave a banjo.

“Annie, you know her. She’ll figure out how to get in trouble with or without us,” Genevieve said.

“Preferably with you,” Rosalie added. “You’re gonna love this.”

Dread jumped into my throat. “Oh god. What are you doing?”

Go to the Mobile Museum of Art, you’ll see a wide balcony overlooking the tackiest museum floor in the world. There’s people on that floor, and usually there is at least one security guard standing square below the railing.

“And there’s one,” Rosalie tittered, “that we’re aiming for in particular. Paul Blart, the guy with the one eyebrow.”

I clapped my hands over my mouth. “Rosalie, no! He seems like a nice guy!”

“He looks like a racist,” Genevieve said in a blink. “Like, put a Confederate flag on his back and it wouldn’t look out of place.”

I said “don’t go around defaming people like that!” even though she was probably right. Something about that guy didn’t sit right with me. It could have been the single eyebrow, but I had a feeling that even if you shaved him right down the middle something would still be off.

“If you’re gonna sneak into the museum, could you at least have the decency to study?” I asked Rosalie, but she had disappeared. Genevieve was still leaning on the railing, flicking through her Instagram feed. It was Saturday, and lunchtime, so the balcony was very abandoned.

“Rosalie has water balloons,” she said plainly. “And big Paul Blart is gonna change positions any time now.”

“Oh god,” I said. Once Rosalie had her plan rolling, there would be no way to stop her that wouldn’t get us all in trouble. The best thing I could do for myself was get far away from the disaster zone and hope nobody tried finding me.

Of course, if I had actually done that, this would be a very different book.

Rosalie was back with a yellow water balloon in one hand and a box of empty water balloons in the other. You know, water balloons only ever get as big as an egg before they pop. Rosalie had somehow gotten this water balloon as big around as a dinner plate. Looking at it was like looking at the sun.

“Hold this,” she said, putting the box in my hand.

Rosalie was in position, holding the water balloon by her fingertips over the railing. “Get ready for this,” she said to Genevieve. Genevieve was recording the whole thing.

“Rosalie!” I said.

Rosalie blew a raspberry at me. “Too late.”

I wish I had said something cool. But in reality, my one-liner was just “Wait, don’t—! Fuck!”

And I said that because in spite of my actions, the water balloon came down, right on Paul Blart. And when that soaking wet man looked up to see where it had come from, I was the first person he saw.

Now, you may judge me for calling this man “Paul Blart,” but by the time this chapter’s over you’ll understand why I’ve got such a low opinion of him.

Genevieve and Rosalie had the good sense to back away so he wouldn’t immediately see them. Me, though, I was screaming, and I was still screaming when Paul Blart came up the stairs.

“You!” he bellowed. He was beet red. “You’re in big trouble! Where are your parents?”

“Um,” I said.

“Come with me!” He dragged me away from the railing by the arm.

I looked for my stepsisters frantically. They were dead gone.

“Jackasses,” I whispered as I was led away.

I thought Paul Blart would take me into an office and call my parents, but he took me back into the exhibits, into Greek and Roman. He let go of my arm, coughed, and walked toward the bench. Before I could ask what he was doing, he knelt and took the banjo out.

He stood and turned to a glass case with a statue’s head in it.

“I’m sorry I got you wet,” I blurted out. “I really am. Are you going to call my parents?”

Paul Blart was breathing strangely, like he’d run up a few flights of stairs. His arms were crossed in front of his chest.

I fidgeted, moving the box of balloons back and forth in my hands. Paul Blart was a cop, right? He wasn’t gonna hurt me. Right? “Sir? Are you okay?”

I moved to the other side of the glass, trying to see what he was doing. I couldn’t read his face at all, because his eyes were covered and the unibrow was throwing me off. His mouth twitched unnaturally. “Do you know what kind of trouble you’re in,” he said.

“Uh, I hit you with a water balloon. Me and no one else,” I added, mentally putting Genevieve and Rosalie on my ‘people indebted to me’ list. “And you already told me I’m in big trouble…”

He hummed, calm as a Hindu cow. “You’re a good listener. That’s funny, your kind’s full of terrible listeners.”

My first thought was “wow, this guy  _ is _ racist.” I crushed the box without thinking about it. “Am I under arrest?” I said quietly.

Paul Blart laughed, and the sound was so sharp that I jumped. “I work for a higher power than the police, Miss Zhu,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. Weird, but okay. “Can I go—”

Paul Blart clapped his hand on my shoulder. I froze. “You know what this statue is, kiddo?”

I gulped. The statue was a bearded man, with one eye dead in the center of his head. “A cyclops, sir.”

“Read the placard,” he said.

“Head of Paula—Poly—Paul-if-uh—Polyphemus,” I finally said. “I’m reading about him in a book.”

“Oh, we’ve got a reader. You’ve got brains,” he said. He didn’t seem quite so mad anymore.

“Thank you, sir. Can I go now?” I said cautiously.

“Hold on there, Miss Zhu,” Paul Blart said. “I’m not through yet. You want to tell me what happened to this Polyphemus?”

Lucky me, that’s exactly what I had been studying before I left. Little did I know that this was the last shred of luck I had left. “Odysseus gave him a fake name,” I said proudly. “And he waited for him to fall asleep, and blinded him.”

Somehow this was the wrong answer. Paul Blart became solemn. I backed away anxiously, but he stepped forward, adjusting his glasses. He was so close I could smell his breath. It reeked of something metallic. “This is it,” I thought. “This is how I die. Indirect death by water balloon.”

“That’s a nice statue, you know,” he said. “But terribly inaccurate. I like the real thing better.”

And then he took his glasses off.

I know weird eyes. I’ve got a weird eye myself, the left one’s lighter than the right one. But under his glasses, Paul Blart had one eye in the middle of his head, and that? That’s not weird. It’s inhuman.

“You’ve got brains, Miss,” Paul Blart said. “Too bad I’m about to rip them out of you.”

Then he pulled out a fucking sword.

I threw myself to the wall, air wooshed in front of my face as the blade barely missed my throat.

I was going to describe the actual feeling of being run through the gut with a sword, but on second thought no one needs to know that.

I was standing there, and I was in shock. My vision was all narrow and I couldn’t feel my arms. I leaned back and slid down to the floor. There was a faint scraping and I realized that the sword’s tip must have gone out my back and was dragging against the wall.

He whistled like he was sweeping up a pile of dust and bent down to get his sword back.

I fell over onto my side.

The last thing I heard before passing out was the smoke alarm.


	2. A Banjo Is Extracted From My Kidney Offscreen

I woke up in the hospital. I assumed I’d had a panic attack or and got delusional before fainting. It wouldn’t be a first for me.

One look down the hospital gown told me that that wasn’t the case. The big bandage on my belly said as much.

I laid in bed, and I knew that at least a little of my hallucination was true. But how much?

Dad stumbled in, looking haggard. A cop and a doctor followed him. The cop was a frowning middle-aged woman. The doctor had a bleach job, which struck me as odd.

“Annie! You’re awake!” Dad threw his arms around me.

I hugged him back. “I’m okay, Dad… maybe don’t jostle me.”

Vivian bounded into the room. She was in a way better mood than someone should be after their child got stabbed — though, I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt, she didn’t consider me her child. And that’s a terrible thing to say, but it was true. Vivian had only been with my dad for maybe a year, and I was so distant that she barely knew me.

Still, watching my stepmother smile like that right after a surgery was a little insulting.

“Good news,” she boomed. “The museum’s not charging us for the damages.”

“Damages?” I said.

“From the smoke alarm. They had to evacuate, and part of the Greek and Roman exhibit is blocked off by the police.”

“Great. Uh, hey, what did the twins tell you?”

“Hm?”

“Did they tell you why they were at the museum?”

Vivian drummed her fake fingernails on the table next to the bed. “Rosalie said that you convinced them to sneak out so they could do their Literature homework. And then they said you got bored and dropped a water balloon on a security guard’s head, so let’s make it clear, the only reason you’re not in trouble right now is because you’re already missing a kidney.”

I groaned. Assholes!

Dad coughed politely, a very obvious I-want-to-say-something-but- I’m-afraid-of-conflict cough. I know this cough because I’ve had this cough. He gestured toward the cop. “This policeman, she’s here to ask you some questions.”

I blinked. “Questions?”

He patted my head. “You were attacked in the museum. You’re lucky you only lost a kidney, but the police still don’t have the guy who did it.”

I was asked what my attacker looked like, if I knew him, why I was at the museum. I told him everything, but understandably I was given a lot of blank stares. “I was probably in shock,” I explained, but I knew that still didn’t add up. Paul Blart took his glasses off before I was stabbed.

The cop explained that I had been rushed to the hospital for an impalement wound to the gut. She said that when they found me the Greek and Roman exhibit was a big mess. There was a big hole in my stomach, but no weapon. There was no apparent attacker. And the strangest thing — was a big black burnt spot, right in front of the Polyphemus statue.

And that’s when I had that thought that only manslaughterers and Steve Urkel can have.

“…Did I do that?”

I figured, “no… I couldn’t have done that.” I wasn’t even sure why I thought that was my fault — I got stabbed and passed out; it’s not like I could have done anything. But going back over that memory with the police, I felt like I was missing something.

And then Rosalie and Genevieve showed up.

To their credit, they seemed more upset than Vivian was. Rosalie seemed genuinely freaked out when she walked in, and looked like she’d lost sleep for a while before that. Genevieve holed up in a dark corner with her phone, so I couldn’t tell if she was guilty or annoyed that I had gotten her caught sneaking out.

Rosalie squeezed me around the waist as the cop she’d shoved out of the way spluttered in protest. “Annie! You’re alive!”

“Yes, I am, but if you keep hugging me my other kidney’ll pop out,” I wheezed. I get that they were happy to see me, but what part of “recovering from surgery” did they not understand?

Rosalie released her death grip, and I flopped back onto the bed. She was wearing her dingy, school-issued backpack. Wait, school? I was at the museum on a Saturday. How long had I been out?

“What day is it?” I coughed.

“Monday, Annie,” my dad said.

I must have been staring swords at Rosalie and Genevieve, because Dad had that cough again; he knew there was something I had to talk to them about. He turned to the cop. “How about you talk to Vivian and I outside?”

The cop frowned. “Sir, we would really like to—”

“Their sister almost died,” Dad said.

“I WHAT,” I said.

“Just let them have a moment alone,” he continued.

“I ALMOST WHAT,” I said, Rosalie hugging me again.

Dad moseyed out of the room with Vivian and the cop as if he hadn’t just casually commented on my near death experience. Seriously, what was up? Was everyone hiding something from me?

I pushed Rosalie away. “Don’t touch me.”

Rosalie cocked her head. “Why not?”

“You know what you did,” I said. “You lied about the water balloons.”

Genevieve said “I actually did that.”

“Get over here so I can kick your ass,” I squeaked.

Genevieve snorted.

I threw my pillow at her. She didn’t flinch.

“Annie, if we get in trouble, people are going to keep a close eye on us,” Rosalie said, glancing away guiltily. “And that’s not what any of us need right now. So I figured, you’re already injured. Pinning the water balloons on you wouldn’t do much harm?”

“Do much harm?!” I snapped. “Your mother hates me! More than usual!” I ran out of steam and began coughing.

“See, that’s why. People are mad, but they won’t  _ punish  _ you.” She grabbed a tube leading out of my arm and waved it in my face. “You’re on machines just to stay alive!”

“That’s an IV and it’s keeping me hydrated.”

Rosalie stopped and dropped the tube. “My point still stands!”

“And I don’t suppose you have anything to do with it?” I said. “You act like you’re hiding something.”

“Yeah, I’m getting to that. Hey, Genevieve?” Rosalie said.

“Yeah?”

“There any security cameras in a hospital room?”

We waited for Genevieve to look it up. “No,” she said.

“Thanks.” Rosalie turned back to me. “I went looking for you after the smoke alarm went off.”

I raised my eyebrows. “What happened?”

“Rosalie threw up,” Genevieve said from her corner.

“Shut up,” Rosalie said. “So I did find you. It was a big mess. There was a funny burning smell… wasn’t nobody there except you and me.”

“Did you find the weapon?” I said.

“The what?”

“The thing that was used to stab me. Like, a knife… or a sw—?”

“Nah, I didn’t see anything of the sort.”

“Oh.”

“I did find this, though.”

Rosalie took her backpack off of her shoulders and threw it to the ground, where it landed with a loud twang. She reached into the bag, and she pulled an object out… and out… and out.

“Rosalie?” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Is that the banjo?”

It  _ was _ the banjo. It was in terrible condition, but that wasn’t a new development. The last time I’d seen it, it was dusty and held together with strips of duct tape. Now the neck had some dry stuff on it — blood? That seemed reasonable. It should have been in the splash zone when I was stabbed.

“I thought it was weird,” Rosalie said. “I put the banjo up earlier, but when I came back to find you, it was laying in the middle of the floor.”

“How’d it fit in your bag?”

“I don’t know, it just… kept going in.” She paused. “Any reason why a banjo would have been involved in your de-kidneying?”

“Uh, the security guard just picked it up. I don’t know why.”

“You think he shoved a banjo through your kidney?”

“Maybe?”

We all got quiet for a while, because what do you even say to that?

Oddly, the banjo seemed smaller than when I’d last seen it — when I was at the museum, the top had come up to my chin, but somehow I could now hold it comfortably.

I played with it until Genevieve finally said “hey, are you playing the crime scene banjo?”

“Ain’t nothing better to do,” I said. “Why, do you have a request?”

“Put that thing away,” she snapped.

“I’ve had this banjo lodged in my kidney, I think I’ve got a right to play it.”

“I refuse to go to jail because you wanted to play ‘Cotton Eye Joe.’”

“Hey, don’t tempt me.”

* * *

You know what sucks? Child proof caps.

For the next couple weeks, I occupied myself by trying to bite the lid off my bottle of painkillers. I was advised to not do anything strenuous, which was inconvenient for everyone. Vivian was especially miffed.

In spite of what she’d have you believe, Vivian is a washed up actress. Her plan b was to take up the family business — bed, breakfast and/or booze. A woman from an Oklahoma tourist trap had approached her on Craigslist, offered to sell her an old saloon. The plan was to move there shortly after the wedding.

I was actually looking forward to it. There wasn’t anything for me in Alabama. The problem was Dad.

Dad was strangely stubborn about staying. In the whole of his relationship with Vivian, he’d let her call the shots, except with this — and it wasn’t even about moving. It was about Oklahoma, specifically. Every time we turned around, he’d come up with another reason why Oklahoma was the worst state in the country. “Literally, the part we’re moving to is called ‘No Man’s Land,’” he said. “Did you know that they’ve got an average of fifty tornadoes in a year?”

“Yan, that’s the same number we get in Alabama; you’re not gonna change my mind. Besides, the moving van is already outside. Why are you being so bull-headed about this?” Vivian said. “It’s like you’ve gone mad.”

Dad pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it, dear.”

On top of that, weird shit kept happening to me as I recovered — not on the level of Paul Blart: sword cop, but still bizarre.

The schedule change meant that I had to stick around for the last day of school.

After Dad married Vivian, I was transferred to Dillon, a “nicer” middle school. Nicer in quotation marks, because while the education was supposedly better, the dust was disgusting, the morals were deplorable, and the building was threatening to collapse at any second. And oh, that school was so blonde, any classroom could be mistaken for a Hitler Youth meeting.

I was shy and Asian and funny-looking, but I wasn’t a punching bag — worse, I was a toy. Let’s catfish Annie. Let’s steal from Annie. Let’s follow Annie into the bathroom and turn off the lights while she’s trying to piss. On and on and on.

At lunch, I went to the bathroom and took out the little bottle of painkillers I needed with every meal. I had to take them in the bathroom because people kept trying to buy them from me in the cafeteria.

I suddenly remembered that I would have gym class that afternoon. That class was bad at the best of times, but it was the last day of school. Anything could happen.

So I decided to take a couple extra pills and let God sort it out.

Bad plan. Bad, bad plan.

I got more restless after taking the pills. Something felt hot and uncomfortable at my back, and I wanted to scratch at it.

I tried looking up the side effects of oxycodone, but Erowid was blocked on school computers. So I was stuck with something on my back that was either a hallucination or an egg sac full of venomous spiders.

If there’s any benefit to losing a kidney, it’s that you don’t have to do jumping jacks. The bleachers were down today — and Dillon had these death trap steel bleachers. If a kid fell down there, he was just gone. Before the accident, you couldn’t pay me to touch it, but I was so high I was ready to run up them.

“Go faster!” Jim Janowski yelled. “If you die, we won’t have to change into our gym clothes!”

Jim would fall over if I blew on him too hard, and he knew it. He used this to his advantage, playing the weak card on that one day that I finally snapped and tried to throttle him. I got suspended for “beating an innocent student” and he got a light warning.

Also, he borrowed fifteen dollars from me on the first day of school.

And in a brilliant moment of opioid-induced stupidity, I decided I would  _ collect. _

Holding my head high, I jumped from the bleachers and landed on my feet. I walked over to Jim with the most murderous look I could muster. He was flapping his mouth, but there was just a faint crackle in my ears.

I reached back to punch him…

And then I barfed on his shoes.

The whole gym exploded into screaming, and so did Jim. “She did that on purpose!” he screeched.

I was starting to sway a little bit, and the gym coach strode over to me and put his meaty hand on my forehead. “Jesus tits, she’s burning up.” He turned to the other kids. “Kids, stay with the other coach. I’m going to call Annie’s parents.”

It was too good to be true. For once, I was getting away with something. I was also sick as a dog and high as a kite, but hey: you win some, you lose some.

At the nurse’s office, I complained about the lump between my shoulderblades. The nurse asked me to take my shirt off. She looked right at it and frowned.

“There’s nothing there,” she said. “Do you want me to call your mom? Or your dad?”

“My dad, please,” I said.

When she wasn’t looking, my hand went back to the lump. There was definitely something there. It was hard, like there was something under my skin.

While feeling around, I felt something start coming out of my skin. I must have been really out of it, because instead of getting disgusted and telling the nurse, I kept picking at it.

After a minute or so, I had pulled a small fragment of… something out of my back.

I was dumbfounded, because it was a smouldering piece of coal.

And I’d never seen coal in real life before, but it couldn’t be anything else, because it was brittle, and black, and  _ glowing with heat. _ I could feel how hot it was, but it wasn’t burning my fingers. It wasn’t burning me at all.

The coal burst into flames.

I yelped “what the fuck” and chucked it at the wall, where it exploded into black dust.

The nurse ducked into the room and frowned. “Why haven’t you put your shirt back on?”

I felt at the place where the lump had been. My hand came away bloody. “Can you look at my back one more time?”

She looked again. “There’s still nothing there. Annie, are you feeling alright? I’m not supposed to give medication, and I’m out of mints… I might could give you a candy cane. I don’t  _ think _ they’re expired.”

“A candy cane would be nice,” I muttered.

The nurse stepped out after that. I took the opportunity to patch myself up. Maybe the wound wasn’t real, but on the off chance it was, I didn’t want to bleed out. I found a big Hello Kitty bandaid, slapped it on the apparently invisible hole in my back, and then put my shirt back on.

“What the fuck,” I whispered as the nurse came back in.

“Can I go to the bathroom,” I asked.

“Sure, sugar, but go quick. Your dad’s gonna be here in a minute.”

I walked away, fully intending to go cry in the bathroom.

Okay. I wasn’t an expert, but I was pretty sure I’d taken too much oxycodone. I could pretend I had the flu and sleep it off… assuming I didn’t die.

I felt like I was getting better, though. After getting that thing off my back, the fever seemed to go down. Or something. I wasn’t entirely sure how that worked.

Shit was just too weird. I needed to sit down.

The bathrooms at Dillon didn’t have doors, just an angled hallway that kept anyone from seeing into it. That made it very easy for somebody to walk in halfway, hear something interesting happening inside, and stop to listen.

I had walked in halfway when the lights went out. I opened my mouth, but before I could snap at whoever was pranking me, the lights came back. But they were different lights.

They flickered, but not like an aging fluorescent bulb. These lights flickered like candles. Two shadows appeared on the wall I could see, cast by the two people in the room.

The first person said “we need to talk.”

It was a familiar voice. Because it was my dad’s voice.

The second person laughed warmly. “Hello to you too, Yan.” Her voice sounded sugary and… equally familiar, but I had no idea why. “Oh dear, that’s a look,” she said, voice full of concern. “What’s wrong?”

“I know what you’re doing, and I want you to stop,” Dad said, and I was shocked because he never got this angry.

The woman sighed a little bit. “I told you, I’m not doing any of this. It’s happening on its own.”

“She was fine earlier!” Dad said. “She was — walking around, and doing homework. Normal things.”

“You can’t pretend she’s normal forever—”

“I don’t care!” he snapped. “You can’t make Annie go to that damned state!”

I froze.

“...Are you quite done?” The woman said. “Because I’m trying to explain myself.”

Dad huffed. “Not nearly, but go ahead.”

“Yan, I know you want to pretend Annie’s a normal girl, but you need to face facts. She’s different. And now that she’s maturing, she’s about to get a lot  _ more  _ different. All we can do is hope she survives it—”

The candy cane snapped in my hand.

They stopped. After a moment, Dad said, “I swear, this building is going to tumble down one day.”

Okay, I was done pushing my luck. I quietly backed out of the angled hallway.

I went back to the nurse’s office and laid down until Dad came in.

We got in the truck and went home.

Dad said “how are you feeling?”

Eh… confused. Betrayed. Kind of dizzy. “Fine.”

He nodded. “Do you feel good enough to move tomorrow?”

I had actually looked forward to moving. There was never anything of value to me in Alabama, and going west had seemed like an opportunity. Now I was less sure. “Yeah,” I said cautiously.

When he got out of the truck, I said “Dad, can I stay here for a second?”

He frowned. “Is something wrong?”

“I’m fine, it’s fine.”

He closed the door and went in the house.

I took a deep breath, and said “WHAT THE  _ FUCK. _ ”


	3. The Macramé Intensifies

At two a.m. the next morning, Dad piled me and my sisters into the back of the moving van.

My dad moved a lot as a kid. Riding in the back of vehicles you weren’t supposed to ride in the back of had become a family tradition. It was still dark out when we got dressed and loaded up, and when I heard that we were getting in the moving van, I thought “thank god, I can get some more sleep.”

Genevieve was a different story.

“Think of it like you’re in a submarine,” Dad said as he helped me in.

“Submarines have lights,” Genevieve protested.

“Here,” Dad said, throwing a flashlight, which whizzed past her into the grass.

“...Was I supposed to catch that?”

“A little, yes.”

Rosalie fished around in the grass and found the flashlight, which she shone at Genevieve. “Come on, Gen,” she said. “Just get in the van. I don’t see any harm in it.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not seeing any good in it.”

Vivian flounced towards us, looking rather like a caffeinated powder puff. Her dresses were packed away, leaving her in a outfit featuring charming colors like tangerine, chartreuse, and fuck you. “Now what’s all this? Genevieve, we have a schedule to stick to—!”

“She’s right,” Rosalie interrupted. “We leave at two in the morning so we get to Dallas by two in the afternoon for lunch.”

“Actually, the GPS says we’ll get there at noon,” Vivian said.

Genevieve scoffed, but got in. “Sure we will.”

The van was so dark that everything outside it looked like a movie. Vivian jumped up on the tailgate to pull the door down. “Okay, girls!” she said. “Next stop, Oklahoma!”

She pulled the door down, leaving us in darkness.

Before opening it again.

“Damn this dress,” she grumbled, pulling her skirt away from the door.

And then closing it for real.

I’ll be frank, I was blacked out for most of the ride to Dallas. Oxycontin fucks you up, kids.

In the fleeting moments that I managed to stay awake, I wondered what doctor would prescribe strong painkillers to a little girl and just let her take off across the country.

(None, actually, but that’s a different story.)

Around one in the afternoon, I woke up and rubbed my face. Something fell off my head.

“Dang it!” Rosalie said. “I almost got to twenty!”

“Huh?” I yawned. The syrupy flashlight did a poor job of lighting the van, but I could see something orange lying next to my face. “Wait… were you doing it again?”

Rosalie laughed. “It’s not illegal!”

“Genevieve!” I said. “Help me! You’re the mature twin!”

Genevieve looked up from her phone, which she was using in her box fortress. “What?”

“Rosalie’s playing the ‘how many tiny decorative pumpkins can I stack on Annie’s sleeping face?’ game again.”

“Rosalie, knock it off.”

I sat up, shaking my head. Genevieve gaped. “Whoa, Annie.”

“What?”

“You’re bleeding.” My hand went to my stomach. “No, your back.”

I touched my back. It was a little damp. Genevieve moved closer. “Huh. I guess I am.”

“What happened?”

I frowned. “Yeah, well. I must have fell over.”

Genevieve said, “You should see a doctor about that.”

“I will, I will,” I said half-assedly, putting on a vest. But now that the events of yesterday had been stirred up in my head, I couldn’t lay them to rest. “...Y’all ever met your dad?”

Genevieve looked at me funny and walked away, stumbling as the van hit its bumps. She must have thought I was high again. Rosalie nodded noncommittally. “Yeah, once. Where’s this coming from?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve just been thinking about my mom.”

“Oh,” Rosalie said. “I bet she’s interesting.”

“‘Interesting’ is putting it lightly,” I said. Everything I knew about my mother was handed down from my relatives, and even they had some mixed feelings.

In ‘05, a baby cousin of mine was fixing to be baptized, who I won’t name because she’s not important. She needed a godparent.

The first choice was my Uncle Jia, but he got creamed by a semi a couple weeks beforehand. The second choice was Aunt Ai, but her cold had turned to pneumonia. The third choice was my dad.

Dad was the family disappointment. His parents had pressured him to go to medical school. He hated it so much he dropped out. He had just gotten out of a two-year enlistment at the time of the baptism, and needed a place to stay.

It was strictly a family affair, but there was a woman there, too. Somehow no one knew her. The assumption was that she worked at the church.

After the baptism was over the whole family went back to the lucky mother’s house and partied. Dad lingered in the church for a while, because he knew he wasn’t welcome. He started talking to my mother, and they went out for a drink.

Several beers later, Dad opened up about his technical homelessness. Even more beers later, my mother convinced him to stay with her in a stripped-down cabin in the woods.

In the brief affair afterwards, Dad painted a lot. Mostly the woods. Sometimes my mother. Dad says I look like her in that round nose. He won’t say it, but my mutant eye looks a little bit like hers, how bright it is. It’s just that she has two, so it doesn’t look as bad.

But it didn’t last. Dad became restless, and re-enlisted. While he was abroad, an army vehicle he was riding in crashed, snapping his leg so badly it never healed right. He went back to the cabin, but it was empty. So he shacked up with his parents.

A month later, Dad went out to get the mail and fell. I think that’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to me. Comedically, nothing in my life will ever top my dad tripping over the cardboard box I was left in as a baby.

That’s the part of the story where Rosalie stopped me. “Dude, what the _ fuck, _ ” she said.

I shrugged again. “That’s just how it is on this bitch of an earth. I mean, I’m at peace with it.”

This part of the story, I kept to myself: I wasn’t at peace with it.

My mother could have been an addict. A con artist who bit off more than she could chew. Or maybe she was just a normal person who couldn’t handle the responsibility. Nobody knew why she left. I certainly didn’t.

My dad, though.

“We’re getting out soon,” Genevieve said, still fixed on her phone. “Mom found something to eat.”

“Cool,” Rosalie said. “I could eat a horse.”

My nose wrinkled. “Great, now you’re making me think of horses.”

“Oh, right, you’ve got that thing,” Genevieve said. “Hippophobia or whatever.”

“She has what?” Rosalie said.

“She’s afraid of horses.”

Rosalie paused. “MY LITTLE PONY,” she belted at the top of her lungs. “MY LITTLE PONY—”

“Stop it, Rosalie, you’re scaring her!”

The van door suddenly rolled open, letting the light in. We all blinked.

“I hope you kids like pizza,” Vivian said, jumping off the tailgate.

* * *

Google “Dallas pizza” and you’ll get four or five articles ranking the best pizza places in the city. This CiCi’s is not one of them.

I’m dead serious, everything in there was sticky. It was like a boys’ locker room on steroids. Every time I took a step, the soles of my shoes made a sound like ripping a length of duct tape away from its roll. The air smelled like grease. It was populated, but only by near-divorced couples and sad bachelors, which made the place depressingly quiet.

The cashier, a Squidward-looking dude of about forty was leaning on his hand. “Welcome to CiCi’s, what’s your problem?”

Vivian was equally, if not more disgusted. “Please tell me we’re getting our food to go.”

Dad looked like he was going to keel over, but not from disgust. Is it possible to develop dark circles within twenty-four hours? My dad proved it is. “Viv… we’ve been driving for twelve hours. Not everyone has your bottomless stamina. How about we eat here and stretch our legs?”

“We’ll lose time!”

“We’re gonna get there late anyway.”

Vivian sighed. “Fine, we’ll flip a coin. Heads, we stay, tails we go.” She turned to my stepsisters. “Girls, you got any money?”

They flipped. Dad won. We were stranded in CiCi’s.

If you’ve ever been to a buffet, you know that there will be points where people split up. When we all went to freshen up, I got done first.

My stepmother was fixing her eyeliner in a grimy mirror. I was hovering awkwardly near her. I said, “hey, Viv, can I go and start eating?”

“You’re not going to get in trouble, are you?” she said, not looking away from the mirror. “No accidents with the pizza ovens?”

“We’re at a CiCi’s. How would I even get to the pizza ovens?”

“You have to  _ cliii _ mb over the coun _ teeer _ …” Vivian drawled, carefully drawing her waterline. “If you go, will you stop bothering me?”

“Yes.”

“...Mazel tov. Now scram.”

I figured, I wouldn’t be alone for more than a minute. That’s not enough time to get in trouble, is it?

In my defense, this one wasn’t my fault.

This CiCi’s was so depressingly quiet that the ringing of the door chime made me jump out of my skin. After realizing what the noise was, I saw that a girl had walked in.

This girl was about my age. With her curly blonde hair and wide pink skirt, she looked like a farm girl. A big backpack was clutched in her grip, and a cowboy hat was perched on her head. She was smiling, but she blinked too often, and her eyes moved too fast.

It took the cashier a minute to notice she was there. “Welcome to CiCi’s,” he said.

“I’m meeting a party that came in earlier,” the girl said. She had an odd, twangy accent.

“You are?” the cashier said, looking skeptical.

“Yeah…” the girl said. She glanced around the restaurant before her eyes landed on me. “I’m meeting with a friend from school.” She beamed innocently. I turned around. She wasn’t going to come over here, was she?

The cashier processed this. “Whatever,” he said.

The girl breezed on by and sat herself down across from me.

We both sat in dead silence for a moment. “Um…” I said.

The girl laughed. “Sorry, that was rude.” She stuck out her hand. “I’m Juliet… Oswald,” she said tentatively. “Are you going anywhere near Oklahoma?”

I looked her hand up and down, then shook it. “...Yes?”

Juliet smiled. Now that I was really looking at her, I could see her eyes were green — real pale green, like mildew. Her face was pale and thin, and she was shaking a little, almost vibrating. “Don’t be shy! What, do you think I’m some kind of crazy person?”

I shrugged.

“...Eh, that’s fair,” she admitted.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What are you asking me?”

She drew her hands down her face. “My Greyhound broke down, and I don’t have any way to get out of here. I assumed someone with kids is most likely to help a girl in need. Can I hitch a ride with you?”

I stared her down. Forgive me for being so distrustful of strangers, I just didn’t want to lose another kidney.

“I have money,” she added. “I can pay for my own food, I swear. I just didn’t want to sit alone. You know, unattended girl in a big city, who knows what could happen?”

Juliet either never learned how to wink, or was trying and failing to bat her eyelashes. At least I could see her eyes, awkward as the situation was.

She seemed honest enough. A little annoying, but so’s every other twelve year-old. Besides, my conscience likes to rattle me about these things. If I said “no,” I could have turned on the news in a couple of days and seen the words “NERD FOUND DEAD IN DALLAS CICI’S.” And that is no way to go.

I said, “You’ve gotta convince my parents… but I believe you.”

Juliet smiled. “So it’s a deal?”

She stuck her hand out. It occured to me that she was asking for a handshake. I cautiously obliged. Her hand was ice cold, with chipped pink nail polish.

“Hey, don’t celebrate yet,” I continued. “ _ I’m _ not gonna be driving the car. My dad’s in the army, so you’ll have to lay the charm on thick.”

Here’s how I assumed the conversation would go.

  1. My dad would get to the table, pull me to the side, and be like “what the fuck, who is this, I don’t have a good feeling about this.”
  2. Rosalie would show up next and hit it off with Juliet. Rosalie hits it off with everybody.
  3. Genevieve would follow shortly after. Would probably say something caustic about the stranger’s outfit and then sink into the background.
  4. Vivian would consider Juliet riff-raff and try to politely ditch her.



You know how I did?

Right, right, right, and wrong.

Wouldn’t you know it, Vivian decided this girl reminded her of herself as a young starlet. I couldn’t picture Vivian as a twelve-year-old. Probably for my own good, because that information’s gotta be too much for a mortal mind.

Dad is a gentleman, so he was just eating his pineapple pizza in the calmest manner he could muster while looking at Vivian out of the corner of his eye.

Juliet was wolfing down pizza in a suspiciously desperate manner, and she was holding conversation in order to divert attention from that. “So, ‘F-Bomb,’ huh?” She said, looking at the back of Rosalie’s favorite sweatshirt.

“It’s my rapper name,” Rosalie declared. “Genevieve, drop me a sick beat!”

Genevieve started gently beatboxing. Dad said, “Rosalie, please, we’re eating,” but it was too late.

They rapped for about five minutes about mushrooms.

Vivian was delicately cutting apart her pizza with a knife and fork. (After experiencing the horrors of eating with lipstick, I can’t judge her for this.) “Dear, have you ever been in a beauty pageant?” she said around a mushroom. “That’s how I got my start.”

Juliet beamed. In the past minutes, she’d proven to be an exceptionally cheerful person. “No, miss.”

“You haven’t even taken a cotillion class?”

“No such thing in New York City.”

Dad choked. “Excuse me?  _ The _ New York City?”

Juliet tapped her fingers on the table. “Yes, sir. Can’t think of any other New York City.”

Dad knocked back some ice water and cleared his throat. “It just seems like a long distance. Where are you going, anyway?”

“This history town. Olympahoma.”

Rosalie sat down with her seconds. “Really? That’s where we’re going—!”

“Why?”

“Yan!” Vivian said. “Don’t be rude.”

“Sorry,” Dad said, dabbing at his face with a napkin. “I’m just… wondering why such a nice young girl’s parents would send her across the country alone.”

I sat silently. Sometimes it’s best to let things play out. Even though I felt like there was something fishy in this conversation Dad was trying to sneak by me.

Juliet shrugged. “I have an uncle in Olympahoma. Some stuff happened in my hometown, and my parents decided it wasn’t safe for me anymore. You know Fresh Prince of Bel-Air? It’s like that.”

Vivian and Dad exchanged mystified glances. Rosalie picked up their slack. “Well, I don’t think it’ll be any trouble to let you hitch a ride!”

“We’ll  _ think about it _ ,” Dad insisted.

“But not for too long,” Vivian murmured into her glass.

Juliet clasped her hands together and turned to me. “Can you excuse me?”

“Oh, certainly,” I said, moving out of her way.

Once Juliet was a respectable distance away, Dad got to business. “Vivian, I’m not letting a stranger into my car.”

“It’s not  _ your  _ car,” Vivian said. “You rented it from Home Depot, for, might I add, a much higher rate than I believe we could have gotten…”

“Don’t try to change the topic.”

Vivian rolled her eyes. “Listen. I know you’ve been anxious about strangers lately, but  _ she’s twelve. _ What could she do?”

I stood up. “I’m gonna get a cinnamon roll.”

“Don’t eat too much sugar, Annie,” Rosalie advised. “You shouldn’t get jumpy in a moving vehicle.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said.

I slipped away from the table and moved towards Juliet, who was fumbling with something in her pocket. “Oh, Annie!” she said. “How’s it looking?”

“Uh… it’s tough to say, but Vivian really likes you. And she’s very good at getting what she wants.”

“So I can go with you?”

“Possibly, as long as you keep acting like Miss USA.”

Her face split into a grin. “It’s not an act, if that’s what you’re insinuating.”

I lowered my voice. “Yeah, this vaguely menacing thing you’re doing right now? Don’t do it in front of my fucking dad. And I’m not insinuating anything.”

She scoffed and patted her thigh. “Sure y’ain’t.”

“Say ‘y’ain’t’ one more time and I’ll kill you in real life.”

Juliet winked at me. So she  _ did _ know how to do that.

I went and got my cinnamon roll.

Vivian, with some wheedling, got what she wanted. Dad mostly agreed because he was on the point of falling asleep. Which he did. Right into his plate of pizza.

Vivian cautiously reached towards his neck with two fingers. “He’s fine,” Juliet said, right as he started snoring.

Vivian frowned. “I’m gonna pay for the meal. You girls want to keep an eye on Yan for me?”

Juliet said, “I’d like to come with you, if that’s alright.”

“Me too,” I said. I was not going to let this chick out of my sight.

“I’m sorry, miss, I’ll get to you in a minute,” he said, before turning to some conversation going on behind him. “What do you mean, ‘it just vanished?’ That’s almost three whole pizzas!”

Juliet sat in one of the waiting chairs, bouncing her leg. Her eyes were darting towards the windows every few seconds.

Eventually her bouncing drove me so crazy I had to break it up. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said, dropping the word practically on top of me. But she looked out the corner of her eye at the window as she said it, and she was sitting up straighter than she had all afternoon.

“Doesn’t sound like nothing,” I said.

Juliet opened her mouth to say something underhanded, but something caught her attention, and she went quiet.

“What?” I said.

She didn’t respond. I followed her eyes.

The booth was occupied by three women that looked older than dirt. One was holding a ball of shitty K-Mart yarn in her lap. The second was holding a stick, which she was using to furiously macramé a red blob of cloth. The third was holding a knife—how did she get a carving knife into a CiCi’s? I wondered. They all had cataracts, old as they were.

Juliet looked to me, her smile starting to melt. Something felt off about those old women—and it seemed Juliet sensed it too. It all felt eerily similar to that day in the museum.

Vivian finally received her bill and went about the process of paying it.

I took a deep breath and glanced back at the women. At least I wouldn’t be alone if something bad happened.

The second woman decided that her ugly yarn blob was good enough, and passed the strand to the one with the knife.

Juliet briefly looked at me, to make sure I was still there, and turned back to the women. And then she turned back to me. Her jaw dropped.

She said, “You can see them?”

It seemed that noise managed to get their attention. All three of them swiveled in our direction. Juliet went quiet again.

The woman with the knife mouthed “do you mind?”

I blinked, and the women were gone.

I jumped up and approached the booth. If I didn’t know better, I might have believed they were never there.

But folded neatly on the seat, there was a red swatch of cloth.

I picked it up and unfolded it. It was just a weird triangle. That was it. No knife, no ladies.

Juliet scampered up behind me. “What’s that?”

I examined it, but didn’t find anything weird. “I don’t know.”

“Time to go, girls!” Vivian said, prancing towards the door. Rosalie and Genevieve followed, with Dad trailing after, wiping tomato sauce off his face.

Juliet put on a vapid smile. “Of course, of course.”

After a certain point, everybody gets a brave face. A way to act calm as a Hindu cow in whatever urgent situation you’re in. But only two kinds of people can toggle fear and calm so quickly: soldiers and child beauty pageant contestants.

In the parking lot, I asked Rosalie if she and Genevieve could ride in Dad’s truck for a while.

She put on this cocky look. “What? Want some alone time with your lady friend?”

“She’s not my ‘lady friend.’ She’s barely a friend.”

“Sure, Anne.”

“What’s going on here?” Genevieve said.

“Annie’s got a bad case of the doki’s,” Rosalie said.

“I do  _ not _ . I just have some things to discuss,” I said.

“Right,” Rosalie snickered. “We’ll leave you to your…  _ business. _ ”

“Don’t say it like that!”

Vivian stuck her head out of Dad’s truck. “Shouldn’t you be in the van?” she said.

“Genevieve and I are going in the truck,” Rosalie said. “We wanna spend some quality time with you.”

Vivian looked at me, and then the cloth. “Where did you get that?”

“I — uh,” I said.

Vivian took the cloth from my hands and unfurled it from the bunched position I’d squished it into. “Why, what a cute shawl!”

“What?” I said. In a jarring disconnect, Vivian seemed to forget her original question instantly. I mean, a shawl can’t be  _ that _ cute, right?

Vivian wrapped it around my shoulders. “There,” she said. “You’re already looking slightly more fashionable. Come along now, girls.” She pranced off towards the truck. I blinked.

Rosalie turned and winked at me. “Good luck, homeslice.”

Rosalie had the spirit. She was a little confused, but at least she had the spirit.

While I was doing all of this, Dad was helping Juliet into the back of the moving van. The moving van itself was a two-seater. In a brilliant stroke of common sense, Juliet chose to sit with the twelve-year-old instead of the shifty middle-aged man.

I hoisted myself into the van, wheezing a little. “Whoa, there,” Dad said. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

“I’m fine,” I gasped. Juliet pulled me into the van far enough that the door could close.

“Where’s Rosalie and Genevieve?” Dad said.

“They’re in the truck,” I said.

He paused, looked at Juliet, and then back at me. “Really?”

“Dad. Come on, I’ll be fine.”

“I know, Annie.” He turned to Juliet. “And I have the utmost confidence that you’re a nice person,” he said, while subtly putting a can of pepper spray in my hand.

“Dad.”

“Shhh. I’ll see you later,” he said. “Genevieve, help me shut the door.”

Genevieve shut the van door. Everything went dark.

There wasn’t any noise except my breathing until the van started. We rolled out of the CiCi’s parking lot. The pain in my side started to flare up.

Juliet said, “Are you okay?”

I said, “Yeah, I’m okay. There’s a flashlight on the floor somewhere, help me find it.”

I couldn’t move around as well as I’d have liked, so it was no surprise that Juliet found it first. A wide shaft of light was cast onto the cardboard boxes to my left, and then swung towards me. “Found it.”

“Cool. There’s a bag to your left. Open that up, there’s a prescription bottle. Grab that for me, please.”

Juliet directed the light to my bag, and rummaged around until she found the little bottle and crawled over to me. “Here,” she said.

“Thanks.”

I shook out the normal amount and took it dry. No way was I going to do the overdose tango again. Juliet’s face scrunched up in concern.

“I was in an accident,” I said. “But I’m okay now.”

“What kind of accident?” Juliet said.

“Um… I was stabbed,” I said. Very few people asked me about it.

“Could you see the knitting women?” she said abruptly.

I paused, mentally thanking Juliet for jumping to this topic, because I don’t think I could have confronted it myself. “I’m pretty sure they were doing macrame.”

“So you did see them?”

“Yeah. I don’t suppose strange things have been happening to you, too?”

“I…” Juliet paused, and glanced around the van. “Never mind. I had a stupid idea,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, feeling discouraged.

Juliet looked at the shawl. “That’s a nice cape.”

“It’s not a cape; it’s a shawl.”

“Come on, dude. Shawls are just socially acceptable capes.”

“Speaking of textile,” I said. “What was up with those women, anyway? It seemed you recognized them.”

Juliet froze. “They’re… in my Bible-themed arts-and-crafts class,” she said cautiously. “‘Yarn, Yahweh, and You.’ We meet on alternate Thursdays.”

“...Can I join—”

“No.”


	4. My Dad Runs Over a Furry

And then Juliet laid down and went to sleep. I was tempted to do so myself, if only because of how confused I was.

I had some deeply mixed feelings about this whole situation with Juliet. A part of me was somewhat relieved to meet her. Finally, somebody else was acknowledging all the bizarre shit in my life!

The bad news was that “somebody else” seemed completely nuts, and I had no way of verifying whether anything she said was true.

Behold, the outline of my essay on Juliet.

  1. _“My name is Juliet… Oswald,”_ she said, like a person who just made up their last name on the spot.
  2. Has money with which she can buy food. Appears to be starving.
  3. I lived in New York City for a while. There’s a lot of crazy things going on there, but Juliet’s accent is not one of them.



The oxycontin started to circulate, and I went a little wall-eyed. When my eyes realigned, I found myself staring at the backpack Juliet had set down.

I looked at Juliet. She was dead asleep.

I crawled over to the backpack and unzipped all the pockets quiet as I could. I wasn’t intending to rummage through, since I didn’t want to make any noise. But maybe a quick peek would be illuminating.

What I immediately noticed was that Juliet had no calculator. Or textbook. Or anything that you would need to go to math camp, or any other occasion that would drive you cross-country. Her backpack was alarmingly empty for someone who had crossed so many state lines.

No clothes. No food. No phone.

So I examined what  _ was _ in the bag.

There was a can of hairspray of the same brand Vivian uses. I wasn’t sure why she had this, but no food. I certainly wasn’t going to touch it. There was a toothbrush, still in its packaging, but no toothpaste. Two bottles of water in her side pockets, one half-filled with red liquid.

I fished around in the smaller pocket of the bag. My hand hit plastic. I pulled out an unlabeled zip-loc bag full of something yellow. It looked like vanilla pudding. It smelled like vanilla pudding. Experimentally, I dipped my finger in it and put some in my mouth. Didn’t taste like vanilla pudding — it tasted sour, but not unpleasantly so, and vaguely familiar.

The last thing I found was a metal lighter. I almost missed it — it was slipped into the side pocket, between the lining and the water bottle, and between how dark it was and how drowsy I was getting, I’m surprised I found it at all. It wasn’t one of those dinky plastic things. It was an old metal lighter, like they would have used in World War Two or something.

I experimentally flicked it open. It made a loud “click-click” sound, and amazingly, a tiny flame popped up. 

Then I heard a horrible screaming.

I froze because I thought it was something that wanted to wear my skin as a dress, but (after a far longer period of time than I’d like to admit) I realized it had to be Juliet, who had bolted upright and was breathing heavily.

“Are you okay?” I said.

“Huh?” she said, her eyes darting around wildly. “Oh… yeah. I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“I—” Juliet paused. “How did you do that?”

I frowned. “Do what?”

“That,” Juliet said, pointing at the lit lighter in my hand. “That’s my peepums’ lighter. It’s been dead for years.”

“‘Peepums?’ Seriously?”

“Yeah, seriously, how the hell did you light an empty lighter?”

I shrugged. “It just lit. I don’t know.”

“Let me see,” Juliet said, holding her hand out.

I passed it to her. She closed the lighter, and flicked it again. Nothing.

She gave it back to me. I flicked it. It lit. “That’s freaky,” Juliet said. “That lighter is older than my daddy is.”

Juliet’s affect had improved significantly after she woke up, in spite of waking up screaming. Maybe being in an enclosed space made her feel better, or perhaps there was something about the lighter itself.

“If it’s dead, why do you carry it?” I blinked rapidly. Spots had invaded my vision.

Juliet frowned. “I like the noise it makes. It’s a cool noise.”

I opened and closed it again; it made the clicking sound, and lit back up. “That  _ is _ a cool noise,” I admitted, swaying back and forth.

Juliet snapped her fingers in front of my face. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“I’m fine, sweetie, I’m just passing out,” I said before passing out.

A couple hours after I passed out, we stopped at a rest stop. When I woke up, I felt better — I was in far less pain than I’d been in a long time. The wound was itchy, but if it’s itchy, it’s healing, right? I think I was feeling better than I ever had, actually. Like, before my near-death experience, I couldn’t so much as make small talk because it was tiring. I chalked it up to existential crisis. Looking death in the eye will make your body straighten its shit out real quick.

Juliet seemed twitchy all over again, proving that her relationship with public spaces wasn’t the best.

“Are you agoraphobic?” I asked her when we got out of the van.

“No,” she said, and walked off like that answered everything.

It was getting dark, so we hurried through the rest stop quickly. It was oddly crowded, though that was because we were just outside Oklahoma City, which had some kind of nerd convention going on, by the looks of the passersby.

Juliet was nervous and evasive the whole time, like she was a fugitive escaping prison, or cheating at a particularly intense game of hide-and-seek. For the life of me, I couldn’t discern why. I mean, seeing Batman come out of the ladies’ room is a unique experience, but it’s nothing to be afraid of.

In the meantime, I discovered that my stab wound had closed entirely. The only evidence that it had been there at all was an angry red scar. No wound on my back either.

Whatever. Add that to the grand list of questions.

I had been sitting in the dark for way too long, and I personally didn’t want to load back up in the moving van, so I sought Juliet out for her opinion. I scrounged the rest stop until I recognized the back of her curly hair situated over the top of a bench.

“There you are,” I said. I sat down next to her. “I need your opinion on something.”

“What?!” Juliet yelped through a mouthful of food. Wait, what?

I looked at Juliet. Her bottle of red liquid was sandwiched between her and me, and half a slice of pizza was in her hand.

“Where did you get that?” I said.

“Get what?” Juliet said, trying to cram the rest of the pizza in her mouth, and promptly choking.

I slapped Juliet on the back. The slice was small, so she wasn’t in too much danger, and — hold on. Small slices? “Oh my god, it’s CiCi’s,” I whispered. “Did you steal  _ three whole pizzas? _ ”

Juliet scoffed. “They were pineapple! I’m doing them a favor.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Where are you even keeping all that pizza?”

“A magician never reveals her secrets.” Juliet winked. “You know, you and your dad do that exact same thing with your nose. Do you even realize that you do it?”

No, I didn’t. If I did it before, I didn’t notice. “Juliet, if Oklahoma law permits, I will kill you.”

“If it permits?” She raised her eyebrow challengingly. “ _ If _ it permits?”

“...I was being sarcastic. You can’t seriously think murder’s legal in Oklahoma?”

“Murder, no. Manslaughter, maybe. Come on, you got a phone? Let’s look it up.”

I gave up on the situation. “No, but Genevieve does. Want to go ask her?”

“Alright,” Juliet said, finishing off her pizza, and the last shred of evidence against her.

I took my smug hitchhiker by the hand and led her around the rest area. We found Genevieve sitting in the truck with her sister, who was strumming — oh my god, Rosalie brought the banjo.

I knocked on the window. They jumped out as soon as they realized it was me. “How did you get in there?” I said.

Rosalie rattled the keys in my face. “I followed your dad around while freestyling. He asked what he could do to get me to leave him alone. He’s been in the bathroom a really long time, by the way. Mom’s waiting in the moving van, what’s going on?”

“He has… relationship trouble,” I said decisively.

“His relationship with the toilet?” Rosalie said.

“...Yes. Gen, can I borrow your phone?”

“Why?” Genevieve said.

“We’re googling whether manslaughter’s legal in Oklahoma!” Juliet said.

“It isn’t,” I said.

Genevieve shrugged. “Doesn’t hurt to check,” she said. “Siri, is manslaughter illegal in Oklahoma?”

We waited for an answer. “No,” Genevieve said.

“I told you,” I said.

Juliet shook her head. “That can’t… fuck.” She trailed off, looking into the distance.

I hesitated at first, but I followed her gaze again. She was staring at the darkened driveway that we’d come in through. At first I didn’t see anything, but then I did. There was someone standing in the driveway — I didn’t see them at first because they were wearing a black morph suit, and on their head, an impressively realistic piece of a wolf fursuit. Realistic to the point that I almost couldn’t parse what I was looking at. I was only reassured by the unblinking quality of its face, which had to confirm it was a costume.

Given everything else I’d seen that night, a guy in a black morph suit shouldn’t have been too eyebrow-raising; a guy in a fursuit, even less so. But this combination, combined with the way they were standing stock still, staring at us, set off a fight-or-flight reaction in me.

And apparently, the same in Juliet.

“Rosalie,” she whispered. “Get in the car.”

“Hm?” Rosalie said, just now looking up.

Juliet was shaking. “Get in the car now.”

“Why, what the devil—”

Just then, my dad barged out of the rest stop building, booking it as fast as a crippled man possibly could. He shouted across the parking lot, “Everybody get in the car right fucking now!”

Now, when a man who’s seen the shit my dad has starts screaming his head off, you take it seriously. As did I. I jumped in the truck near immediately, through the driver’s side, and clambered over the gear shift to the passenger’s seat. Something animal knew that there was no time to go around to the proper door.

Rosalie and Genevieve were still being dithersome. “What’s going on?” Genevieve said, looking blindly in the dark.

I peered out the windshield. The furry was still standing there but was it — was it coming closer? Something was awful uncanny about this thing—

I clapped my hand over my mouth. The wolf’s shining eyes had clearly, unmistakably blinked. And it was coming towards us.

Like a girl possessed, Juliet flung the back truck door open and shoved the twins inside. She scrambled in as well, locking the door behind her.

My dad shouted “Vivian, go! Drive! Get out of there!” as he jumped in and tore out of his parking space.

“Yan?!” Rosalie shouted, clinging to her banjo like a security blanket. “What happened?”

“Dad, slow down!” I said.

Dad honked violently at the other cars in the parking lot. “Kids, there’s a time and a place for questions… and this ain’t it!” he said, turning towards the driveway, where the furry stood.

Foam dripped from the furry’s mouth. It was rabid. And it was looking at us.

Before it could finish snarling, Dad floored it. “Brace yourselves!”

The truck slammed into the furry. Fluid spattered on the windshield. Shiny golden fluid. No time to marvel on that color. Dad swung onto the highway, keeping his speed up at a hundred miles an hour.

“It’s still behind us!” Juliet said.

I looked in my rear view mirror. The furry’s dark, but human body was running on all fours, and its rabid wolf’s head was barking its head off, trailing blood, gold, and foam all over itself from its eyes, its nose, its mouth. And it was keeping pace.

“Juliet,” I said. “WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT THING?”

“ANGRY,” Juliet said.

“Don’t distract me!” Dad said. “Our exit’s coming up! We can make it!”

“Is Mom behind us?” Rosalie said.

“It doesn’t want your mother, Rosa-lie!” Dad said, an abrupt turn breaking his words in half. “It wants us!”

“OH SHIT,” I said as the furry rammed the car, sending us screeching off the road.

I looked out my window in a daze and saw only dirt pressed against the glass. I looked to my left. The driver’s door was torn off its hinges and through the hole I could see the dark night sky. And no Dad.

There was a little bit of blood trickling down my face. Damn it. Haven’t I been injured enough.

I looked behind me. The twins had fainted. Juliet’s eyes were wide open, which for a split second convinced me she was dead until she raised a finger to her lips.

“Don’t move,” she whispered.

The banjo Rosalie was holding had been ejected through the windshield; the neck was jutting out of the car and the wide end was trapped on the other side of the glass. An inch to the left and it would have been ejected through my head.

Outside, there was the faint sound of sand shifting.

Where was Dad?

I peeled myself off the car door I’d been laying on. The old truck’s airbags had failed, and it was easy to scale the interior to the door above. Juliet grabbed my leg. “What the hell are you doing?”

My nerves were too shot to answer, so I kicked her off.

I crawled out of the wreckage and flopped into the dust. The sudden change in orientation threw me off. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the dark shape of the furry prowling behind the truck.

It slapped the ground as it moved. I could hear it sniffing at something. Snuff snuff snuff. It stood upright, lifting a bearded shape off the ground.

It continued sniffing and shaking Dad. He was dead still.

I realized this was my opening. It wasn’t paying attention to me.

I stayed low, but I went around to the front, where it couldn’t see me. There was little I could use to attack. The car door was on the ground in front of me, partly crushed. Too heavy.

I looked at the banjo.

“Fine,” I thought. “It’s better than nothing.”

I grabbed the neck of it and started pulling. Hopefully the windshield was broken enough that it would come right out.

Shing.

Wait a second, banjos don’t make that noise.

Suddenly, I wasn’t holding a banjo. I was holding a sword.

I blinked. Juliet, still hiding in the truck, had her hand over her mouth.

The very tip of the sword was still through the windshield, and trapped in the banjo drum. I pulled it all the way out. The drum fell with a piercing twang.

Okay, how the hell does a banjo twang in that situation?

The furry turned its sticky head towards me. It huffed.

Alright, Annie, it’s now or never.

It dropped my dad and charged.

I screamed and held the sword out. Something warm hit me like a wave.

I opened my eyes. The furry was gone. I was covered in golden furry blood.

I threw down the sword and ran to my dad. “Dad! Dad!” He didn’t move. I backhanded him across the face.

Dad, like a reasonable person, immediately woke up and punched me. “Booyah!” he screamed.

We both screamed for a solid minute.

“I’m okay! I’m okay, I was playing dead!” he finally said.

“Well, it was  _ convincing! _ ” I looked back at the car. Juliet was clambering out, waving something shiny at me. I couldn’t focus on it.

Dad sighed. “At least that thing’s g…”

He trailed off. I looked back at him. He was staring into space. “Dad? Hello?”

His eyes rolled back into his head and he collapsed.

I stared at him for Lord knows how long. “What the fuck just happened,” I whispered.

Juliet put her hand on my shoulder. “Annie, we need to get moving.”

I snatched her hand. “Don’t you fucking touch me.”

“Sweetie, we need to—” 

And that’s when I snapped.

“I’M NOT YOUR  _ FUCKING _ SWEETIE!” I threw a punch blindly, which Juliet ducked. She ran to the other side of the car. I ran after her, grabbing my sword off the ground as I passed it. A dam had burst, and I wasn’t slowing down any time soon.

“I’m getting dragged ‘cross the country for god-knows-what, shady people keep trying to eat me, and the only person who can explain any of it might’a just  _ died _ while you were sitting on your ass! Well, you won’t even  _ have _ an ass by the time I’m done with you!”

Juliet might’ve taken my outburst more seriously if I hadn’t been crying the entire time.

The second I caught up, I reared back to punch her again, but she grabbed my arm and pulled me into a tight chokehold. Tight enough to make my vision fuzzy.

She was saying something, but I couldn’t hear it.

As my eyeshot tunneled, I noticed something: there were  _ two _ swords on the ground.

One of them had a bright pink ribbon tied about the handle.

Well, shit.


	5. Cyrus Is Cool, Everyone Else Can Fuck Off

I woke up to a crackle, and the dim sound of somebody banging two coconut shells together.

I blinked and looked for a window. How long was I out? Damn.

Then I realized: I’d passed out for the third time in a month.

“Not this shit again,” I said, before rolling over and trying to go back to sleep.

Whatever peace I could find was swiftly interrupted. I heard a loud creak and footsteps. I glanced around.  _ Wait a second, where the hell am I, anyway? _ I was lying on the floor in front of a warm, old-timey furnace. The ceiling was boards.

The entering party approached me and touched the side of my head. I turned to face them. “What up,” I said.

“Ah!” he (there was no mistaking it, in spite of that incredibly high-pitched scream) said. He was wearing these gaudy cowboy boots, and from there I looked up… and up, and up, and saw this frightened brown, freckled face about my age peering down at me. “You’re awake!”

“Sure am.”

“Okay! Okay,” he said. He looked like I’d risen from the grave. “Sorry. You surprised me. I’ll get you something.”

He stepped away. I sat up, feeling dizzy. I leaned on my left hand and explored my head wound with the right. It was gauzed, but felt full of dry blood. Someone had cut my hair. “Am I concussed?” I said to nobody in particular.

“No,” the boy said from another room. I was surprised he was being helpful. “We got you checked out at the hospital. That cut was nasty, though,” he rambled. “The doctor had to shave your head. Sorry about that.”

“It’s cool. I hated that haircut.” I did. I’d looked like the chick from The Ring.

The boy came back with a spoon and a tiny saucer. I noticed his eyes were much the same as Juliet’s: constantly moving. “Nystagmus,” my dad would call it, but that’s the name for involuntary motion. This seemed deliberate. “No more painkillers,” I said.

“This isn’t painkillers,” the boy said. “This’ll fix you up in a different way. You feel alright sitting up?”

“Yeah.”

“Here.” He handed me the saucer. My eyebrows shot up. It was vanilla pudding — not a lot of it. You know those ketchup cups you get at a fast food joint? About that much pudding. “Does this smell like anything?”

“No. Should it?”

“No, it’s just a standard question.”

I cautiously tasted the pudding. It tasted the exact same as the stuff in Juliet’s bag. I realized what it reminded me of. Lemon filled donuts. There’s a place in Alabama that gives kids a free donut for every A they get on their report cards. I tried to get all A’s so I could split them with my dad.

It went down okay. When I looked up, the boy’s eyes were bulging. “What? Is something wrong?”

The boy coughed and shook his head. “Sorry. I’m just thinking of updating your file.”

“My file? A file on what?”

“That’s, um, complicated,” he said, fidgeting. “You sure you want to hear it?”

“Just tell me.”

The boy smiled nervously. “Annie, do you have a single parent? Or any suspicions of wedlock?”

I squeezed my eyes shut. “I don’t know my mother.”

“Uh, yes, that’s our concern. We don’t… your mother might not be human, exactly.”

I opened my eyes and exhaled. “Yeah, I had that feeling. So, if she’s not human, what is she? What am I? What the —  _ what am I? _ ”

The boy was quiet for a moment. “I don’t usually do these talks… it could be better to just  _ show _ you. Here,” he said, sticking out his hand. “Let’s go outside.”

I took his hand. “Thanks… you,” I said, realizing that I didn’t know his name. “You’re the first person who’s bothered explaining anything to me.”

“Oh, I’m Cyrus,” he said placidly. “I work here; at the Home. There’s lots of crazy things going on in this building, so please steel yourself. Are you okay walking?”

“Yeah, I’m good.” As he led me towards the door, I saw the room a little more clearly. “If there’s a couch in here, why was I on the floor?” I grumbled.

“If somebody’s injured, we have a policy of moving them around. Sometimes putting them in certain places helps with pain.”

“Wait, wait, wait.” There was something on the couch, it looked like — yes. “Is that my banjo?”

“I believe so. We found it in the accident site. Do you want it?”

“I’m checking something.” I limped to the banjo, taking the neck in one hand and the drum in another. I took a deep breath and pulled the neck. Shing. Yup. Same situation.

Cyrus’s eyebrows went up. “ _ That’s _ your sword?”

I shrugged. “I guess.”

“Let me just — you’re good standing there?” I nodded. “Okay, okay…” He walked over to a desk and took out a file. “Previous injury, possible fire association, proper response to ambrosia, absent mother, no issues pulling sword…” he murmured, scribbling.

I looked over his shoulder. “Any chance of me learning all this jargon?”

Cyrus waved me over, approaching the door, file still in his hand. “Yes, yes, just follow me through here. And keep an open mind: this is all real, what you’re seeing. None of this is a joke.”

The building was a house, and it was a big house, which could reasonably house a great deal of children. I didn’t see any of them. “It’s after noon,” Cyrus admitted while helping me down the stairs. “They’re probably out doing other things. It’s fine. I can just take you to Chiron; I was going to do that anyway.” The curtains were drawn and the sun was shining in. The ground was grassless and tumbleweeds were bumping the window, like children trying to get my attention.

“We’re in Olympahoma,” I said absently.

“Yes, we are,” Cyrus said. “I should’ve told you that first, I guess. I’m sorry, I can be scatterbrained.”

Cyrus was real nice, if a little mousy. His polite demeanor was a welcome reprieve from all the shady shit. “Don’t apologize. You’re more helpful than my whole family put together.”

“Back door, final stretch, here we go!” Cyrus said as we reached the bottom of the stairs. We were in some type of rec room. There was a ping-pong table there, which surprised me, because everything else was consistently Wild West-looking. “How’s your headache?”

I touched it. It had died to a dull throb. “Better.”

“That’s good. If you need to sit down at any time, just tell me. Okay,” he said, opening the door with a smile. “Meet Chiron.”

Cyrus helped me onto the back deck of the house. My immediate first thought was… “Is that a horse?”

In the backyard of this house, there was a big, bearded cowboy riding a horse, talking to somebody. But there was something off. The man’s legs were a little floppy. As was the horse’s head. This, combined with the fact there was a horse at all, made me uneasy. Cyrus called out to the cowboy: “Hello, Chiron! Annie just woke up!”

“Cyrus!” The cowboy waved his hat at us. His voice sounded vaguely formal, borderline posh. “She seems well. Do you want me to give her the… what do you call it? ‘Olympahoma Hello?’”

“Yes, please!”

“Well, then get ready…” The cowboy reached behind his back, making a motion like he was unbuckling something. Then he reached down, and unbuckled something from the horse.

The cowboy’s legs came off. The horse’s head came off.

“Holy fuck,” I said.

“Do you need to sit down—?”

“Yes,” I said, falling flat on my ass.

The cowboy’s acquaintance teetered over to me. “You okay, sweetheart?” she slurred.

“Vivian?” I said. “Are you  _ drunk? _ ”

Vivian drinking alcohol was nothing new by far, but she never got shitfaced the way she was then. Her makeup was all over the place and she’d torn her dress. “Jus’ tipsy, dear. Tipsy,” she said, waving casually. “I’m talking to a goddamn  _ centaur _ , I’m allowed to have a drink.”

“Mrs. Zhu, could you please back up?” Cyrus said. “Are you alright, Annie?”

“Oh, don’t mind me,” I said, lying down on the deck. I started screaming.

“Yeaaah,” Vivian said, sounding like she just remembered when she put her pen. She slung her arm around the cowboy’s waist. “Boys... dis is my stepdaughter Annie. She’s scared a’ horses.”

“Oh my goodness! I’m so sorry!” Cyrus said.

“It’s alright,” I said, turning away. Cyrus scampered around to that side. “I can just... cover my eyes and try not to think about it. No offense, uh, Chiron.”

“I am not offended. I have lived a long time and encountered a fair amount of equinophobes. Though I cannot say I have seen this specific reaction.”

Cyrus laughed anxiously. “Uh… okay, so I guess you can take it from here? I can walk Vivian home, and you can show Annie around—”

“Actually, Cyrus,” Chiron said. “If your charge cannot even look at me, I do not believe she will let me give her a tour. It would be opportune if you took over for me.”

“B-b-but!” Cyrus sputtered. “You always do the tour! That’s the rule!”

“Hey,” I said. “Nothing against the rest of you, but if anybody’s gonna show me around, I’d rather it be Cyrus.”

“Oh, Annie!” Cyrus said, flustered. “I’m nowhere near qualified to do that!”

By then, it was very clear that Cyrus wasn’t prepared to deal with me — which wasn’t novel, because  _ I’m _ not prepared to deal with me. “Hey, come here.” I whispered to him: “My other options are my drunken stepmother and my worst nightmare. Your qualifications are kind of moot.”

“If you have resolved this issue, I would like to escort Mrs. Zhu out,” Chiron said. “I trust you can do this.”

“I believe in you, Cyrus!” I said.

“Um, thanks,” Cyrus said.

I gave him a thumbs up as Chiron coconut-clopped away.

“So. Centaurs, huh.”

Cyrus and I walked through town, watching a tumbleweed with a goat’s hindquarters sticking out of it roll down Main Street, the owner of which was bleating in distress. The goat legs, not the tumbleweed.

A throng of tourists were being guided through town, taking pictures of all the historic stuff, completely ignoring this spectacular scene. “Why aren’t they looking at this?”

“We’ve got, uh, Mist that keeps them from noticing the real weird stuff. If some kind of mythological antics get too strange, the Mist blocks it. I don’t think they even see the tumbleweed.”

I approached the tumbleweed gingerly and stopped its rolling. “I didn’t think tumbleweeds got this big.”

“It’s uh, not the strangest thing you’ll see in this town,” Cyrus said, helping the trapped goat out of the tumbleweed. Well, not a goat — half a goat. Human from the waist up. Little horns poked out of his hair, and he wore a checkered shirt, like a farmer. “Are you alright, Billy Joe?”

“Alright indeedy,” said Billy Joe the satyr. “Hold up.” He reached back into the tumbleweed and pulled out a wide-brimmed hat, which he slapped on his head. “There it is. Darn thing keeps getting blown away. And who be this?” Billy Joe said, pointing to me.

“I’m Annie.”

“Oh,  _ you’re _ Annie. Awful sorry about what happened.”

I blinked. “Yeah. Well.”

“I’m taking her — her out to the thunderdome,” Cyrus said.

“Sweet. I’d join you, but I was doing a tune-up on Old Nelly when that tumbleweed done stole my hat, and I might should get back to it.”

“I’ll leave you to it,” said Cyrus.

“Bye now!” the satyr said, walking towards a barn. The doors were open, and inside I could see what was obviously a huge truck. That didn’t seem very 1879 — and it was two feet away from the mob of tourists.

“Why can I see all the weird stuff going on, but not the tourists?” I asked.

“You’re a, uh, demigoddess, so the Mist doesn’t affect you. Come on, let’s gallivant.”

Cyrus and I gallivanted.

“So, centaurs and satyrs… Greek stuff, yeah? And ‘Olympahoma,’ that’s like ‘Olympus?’”

Cyrus beamed. “Yeah, you’re getting it!”

“And I’m a demigoddess. That means I’m related to a god.”

“Yes, as are the, uh, majority of townsfolk here. Olympahoma’s a safe haven for demigods, satyrs, and other mytholo — m-m-myth…”

“Weird shit?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

The bright sunshine started giving me a headache, so I closed my eyes. “Why do you need a safe haven?”

“The gods in the stories are real. So are the monsters. They’ve got a natural taste for demigod blood.”

“Why can’t we just lay low?”

“When puberty hits, laying low is hard. That’s… around the time we start meta — metamor—”

“Hold up— _ metamorphosis? _ I’m not going to grow a cocoon, am I?”

“N-no, that’s not how it works. It’s not like that. Your powers start coming in around puberty — and there’s not really a way to hide them at first, because you have fuck-all control of them. So monsters find you pretty quick.”

“Oh. That blows.”

He looked towards me. “The doctor’s, um, pretty sure you’ve been through a monster attack. It looks like you sustained some massive injury to your side a few months ago, and uh, scarring where some kind of mass was removed.”

“I was stabbed by a cyclops,” I said, touching the wound. “But it was only a few weeks ago.”

Cyrus cocked his head. “I would say that’s the effect of ambrosia, but… Doctor said it was healed before she gave you any?”

I remembered what I did in the moving van. Juliet’s bag of pudding. “Juliet. She had some ambrosia in her bag. I tasted it.”

“Oh, Juliet. She’s—”

“What the heck is this?” I said.

We were standing in front of the biggest building on the block: a fancy brick building towering over the others, yet twice as old. The dust-weathered sign read “FAUNTLEROY DANCEHALL.” What was going on in there did not sound like dancing. It sounded more like a swordfight, which given everything I’d seen thus far, wasn’t implausible.

“This is, uh, Fauntleroy Dancehall,” Cyrus said. “Also called ‘the thunderdome.’ We use it for dueling nowadays. All off-limits to the tourists, of course.”

Fauntleroy Dancehall was probably the only actual 1800s building in the area, and yet they’d up and converted it to an arena. I don’t blame them though, it was a lot of empty floor-space in a town that really needed somewhere to practice fighting. A rough ten percent of the building was taken up by benches and vending machines. The other ninety was taken up by training mats covered by teenagers dueling with swords.

A few of the duelers looked up at me, but most of the gawkers were sitting on the benches.

“Well, looky there!” Someone jeered. “It’s the great furry slayer! Is she gonna play us a tune?”

It occured to me I was still holding my banjo.

“Can I kick his ass?” I said calmly.

“I — not yet. I mean, no! No!” Cyrus sputtered, pulling me away from the jeerer. “Dancehall rules say you can only fight somebody who’s already standing on the mats.”

It seemed that everybody in the dancehall was a kid, except in the empty corner near the Pepsi machine, there was a crossdresser and a chorus girl sitting and playing poker. On the other side of the dancehall, there was a gaggle of boys crowding around someone. “What’s going on there?”

“I don’t know, let’s see.”

The wall of boy meat was so solid I couldn’t shove my way through. After a good minute of struggling, Cyrus finally said, “I can — I can pick you up if you want?”

I sighed. “Okay.”

Cyrus put his file between his teeth, picked me up, and placed me on his shoulders. The added five-and-a-half feet let me see what the boys were looking at.

“So my sword’s totally stuck in there, right, I’m freaking out, my charge is having a seizure, and the nurse just finished unclogging the toilet. So I take the body, and I start dragging it to the window…”

I couldn’t believe it. “Put me down,” I said.

“What? What’s going on?” Cyrus said.

I thrashed around. “Put me down! JULIET!” I screamed into the crowd, waving the banjo. “I’M HERE FOR YOUR  _ ASS! _ ”

Juliet looked up over the crowd around her. I saw the light of recognition in her eyes. “Sorry, folks, party’s over! Let me the fuck out of here!”

Unfortunately for her, she wasn’t Moses, and the crowd certainly didn’t part like the Nile. Cyrus grabbed me and put me back on the floor. “Settle down!” he said. “Don’t hurt yourself!”

“Oh, it’s not me you should worry about!” I said, darting towards the crowd. “Come here!”

Juliet burst out of the crowd, bolting onto the training mats. “I didn’t do anything!”

“She’s on the mats! It’s fair game!” I screamed back at Cyrus. I pulled my sword from the banjo and booked it after her. “This is for my daddy, you Barbie-looking piece of shit!”

Juliet ran across the mats and right out the door. The exertion was tearing my lungs up, but I followed her outside anyway. “I had nothing to do with your daddy!”

I flung the banjo at her. It flew past and bounced in the dust. “Stop being a wimp and face me, Juliet — or, god help me, whatever your real name is!”

Juliet stopped and turned around. “Okay, first off, you don’t throw your weapon. That’s the stupidest move you could pull, even if you didn’t miss—”

I slapped Juliet so hard she fell into the dirt. “Did you slap me in the  _ eye? _ ” she shouted.

“You got lucky! I meant to punch you, but my hand opened at the last second!” I kicked her in the ribs. She grabbed my ankle and pulled me down with her.

I could tell you the details, but let’s be frank, it was a fight between two twelve year old girls. It wasn’t that exciting, or orderly. Juliet was hesitant to defend herself, given that I already had a concussion, but I had no reservations for her. If she wanted to go out to dinner, she’d have to eat somewhere else.

I had my jaw clamped on Juliet’s arm when Cyrus finally picked me up and pulled me off of her.

“Put me down! Put me down!” I hollered. Blood dripped down my chin.

“No way!” Cyrus said. “You’re practically rabid!”

Cyrus dropped me in the dirt and sat on me as I flailed around. Juliet was lying in the dirt, squeezing her grievously bitten arm, but otherwise showing no signs of alarm. Now, if an angry girl had bitten  _ me _ so hard I bled, I’d be a little more concerned.

Cyrus’s strategy eventually succeeded. I eventually ran out of smoke to blow and laid face-down in the dirt, completely still.

“Is everyone okay?” Cyrus said when he stood up.

Juliet gave a thumbs up, still lying in the dirt. “That was fair.”

I moved to get up, but Cyrus made a halting gesture. “No, stay there until I figure this out. Chiron usually takes new blood to the thunderdome t-to see the others doing cool stuff with their powers. Y’all care to explain w-why you so  _ rudely _ interrupted? And — and  _ one at a time! _ ” he snapped when we both began prattling.

Juliet raised her hand like a schoolgirl.

Cyrus pointed at her. “Juliet. Go.”

So I’m coming back from an escort quest—

(said Juliet, still lying in the dirt)

—when the Greyhound I’m on gets assaulted by the Minotaur. I come out of the fight okay, but the Greyhound is trashed. So now I’m stuck in the middle of the desert with jack shit in the way of a ride.

I call up Rhody to ask what I’m meant to do next.

(“You don’t have a phone,” I said.)

I’m just fucking good, baby. So I call up Rhody.

Rhody says there’s a godling family coming towards Dallas, which is around where I am. He says I can hitch a ride with them and save some other chaperone some time.

So I say, “yeah, that salts my melon,” and I go try and find them.

I catch up to Annie and her folks at CiCi’s. I give them a fake name, because I don’t know these people. I don’t know what they want or why they’re here. They could be cannibals for all I know. Usually I’ve got somebody who can tell me these things, but Austin broke a leg on the way to Long Island, so I had to leave him.

I spend the whole time at CiCi’s talking to them. So far, I’ve figured that this is a weird family, but I’ve got nothing to make me believe that they’re anything special. So Annie’s stepmom says “I’m gonna pay for this pizza—”

(“You shoplifted three pizzas, Juliet! How did you forget about that?”)

I didn’t shoplift. I dined and dashed. Get your vocabulary right.

And around that time, I fucking spot the Fates sitting in a CiCi’s booth, doing some knitting. If they cut the thread, it means somebody’s about to be dead or dead by-product. It’s not actually something I’m concerned about, since I have a near-death experience every other breath.

What alarms me, though, is that Annie sees ‘em too. And what’s worse, the Fates make direct eye contact as they cut the thread.

So yeah, that’s where Annie got that shawl. You’re probably wearing your own death sentence, y’know. Ain’t that metal?

By the time we’re outside Olympahoma, I’m fairly certain that Annie has some of the good blood. She seems pretty weak, though, so I’m not really bothering to tell her yet.

My biggest worry is that there’s at least two of us travelling in the same vehicle, and we’re in monster country. And if the Fates are looking at Annie, then that’s something to be doubly worried about.

When we’re outside Olympahoma, we park at a rest stop, and my luck runs the fuck out. ‘Cause that’s when a Fury spawns in the parking lot.

(“She means ‘furry.’”)

Nah, I mean what I mean.

So a Fury spawns in the parking lot.

It takes me a minute to figure out what it is, because I’ve  _ never  _ seen a Fury in person. Like, if Zac Efron were in that parking lot, that would be less weird than this.

Somebody must have tipped Annie’s dad off, because he bursts out of the bathroom hollering, and sends us speeding down the highway. The good news is we’re going a hundred miles an hour. The bad news is the average foot speed of a Fury’s got to be way faster, because it rams us off the road.

Annie and her sisters faint. Her dad and I are still awake, but we’re playing dead because that’s really our best bet here. The Fury drags her dad out of the car and sniffs him.

It looks like it might leave us alone… then Annie wakes up and goes ballistic on it.

That being said, I have no idea who gave Annie a sword, but she does it. She kills the Fury.

“D-do you need help?” Cyrus said to Juliet after she finished saying all this. “You’ve been lying in the dirt for like, fifteen minutes now.”

“Nah, man. I just like dirt. Is Annie okay? She’s been really quiet.”

“Annie laid down and started staring into sp-space right after you said ‘Fury.’”

“Understandable. Hey, there’s a few dollars in my left pocket. Buy us soda.”

“Why don’t you buy it?”

“If I leave, somebody might bother Annie and she’ll bite their head off. If I stay, people will think we’re just chilling.”

“Fine.”

After Cyrus took the offered dollar and went back into the building, Juliet got up and rattled me. “You okay, darling?”

“This is insane,” I said. “You’re telling me I’m a goddess? And, like… Zeus and Hades and all the others, that’s real?”

“ _ Half  _ goddess,” Juliet corrected. “And ease off the invocation; I don’t want to get struck by lightning.”

“What, can they hear us when we say their names?”

“Strictly speaking, yes, though they’re less touchy about it in the south. When I was in New York, there was ominous thunder every five seconds because that’s what happens there. I guess they don’t understand our accents.”

She sat down next to me.

“Huh,” I said.

“So, are we cool?”

“I’ll tolerate you,” I decided. “I don’t  _ trust _ you. But I do need information from you, so, for now… I’m putting off my epic revenge campaign.”

“I think that’s the nicest thing you could’ve said to me.”

“Yeah, don’t push your luck.”

Cyrus returned with soda. He handed me a Sprite and Juliet a Coke. “Dr-drink up.”

Juliet knocked back her can of liquid without looking, and coughed up some thick white stuff. “What the — is this ranch dressing?”

“Suck on that. L-lazybones.” He paused. “Uh, I’d like it back when you’re done. That came out of my lunch.”

“Hold on,” Juliet grumbled, before continuing to drink, albeit much slower.

“So, Annie,” Cyrus started. “What we normally do after this is—”

“Who cares about  _ normal! _ ” Juliet exclaimed, cutting him off. “Ain’t nothing about this  _ normal _ , even by our standards. I’m drinking ranch dressing, for god’s sake, and you’re over there talking about  _ normal. _ ”

“I—I—” Cyrus said, scrambling for words. “Okay, maybe you’re right, but let’s not throw the paperwork out just yet!”

“Really?” Juliet said. “If the paperwork’s so important, let’s have a look at it!”

Juliet charged Cyrus. “HEY NOW,” Cyrus said, holding the file over his head. Juliet jumped up and down trying to grab it. “Annie, catch!”

He flung the file at me. I flinched and closed my eyes, expecting it to hit me in the face — I was more than surprised to see I’d caught it.

Juliet walked up to me. “Can I have that?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, handing her the file.

Cyrus gasped. “Annie, I trusted you!”

I shrugged. “What happened to not throwing the paperwork?”

Juliet grinned and put up her hand. “Ha! Up top!”

“Don’t high-five me, Juliet.”

“Okay!”

“I need that file back!” Cyrus said, running towards us. Juliet grabbed me and started sprinting the other direction.

“YOU’RE NOT GETTING IT!” she yelled over her shoulder. “AND YOU’RE NOT GETTING YOUR RANCH DRESSING, EITHER!” she said, punctuating herself by spiking the Coke can into the sand.

“NOOO!” Cyrus screamed behind us. “...What am I gonna do with my baby carrots?”


	6. I Meet Dr. Docter Dockter Doctor

We ran at top speed until Cyrus slipped out of view. Juliet sat on the nearest wood porch.

As I slowed, I saw that I must’ve bitten her harder than I’d intended. She’d gone back to clutching her arm, but I could see blood gushing between her fingers. “Are you okay?” I said.

Juliet removed her hand. The bite was hardly visible, she was bleeding so much. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “As long as this cold-ass wind doesn’t blow any dirt into it — it’s freezing right now! Did you notice that?”

“It’s, what, sixty degrees?”

“Yeah, in Oklahoma. In May. At noon. Don’t you think it’s odd?”

“ _ I _ think you need a doctor.”

“Yeah? Well, guess whose porch I’ve sat on.”

I looked up. The sign said “OLYMPAHOMA HOSPITAL.” Behind the letters, in a different color, there was a painted lyre.

The hospital’s western-themed exterior hid a functional infirmary on the inside. We sat in a waiting room, waiting for Juliet’s arm to get looked at.

I hadn’t noticed earlier, but Juliet looked much less lunatic. She must have cleaned up while I was unconscious. Her hair was brushed out, and she’d applied pink lipstick (which I would later learn is the only makeup that survives Oklahoma heat). She was sickly white, but that seemed consequent of blood loss.

“Are you sure I didn’t hit a vein?” I said.

“Nah,” Juliet said calmly. “I’m just pale. Don’t worry, Dr. Doctor will be here in a minute.”

I thought I misheard her. “Doctor what?”

As I said that, a blonde, middle-aged woman in a lab coat walked in the door. “Who’s next?” she said.

I looked back and forth. We were the only people in the waiting room. “Hey, Doctor,” Juliet said. “Annie got her panties in a twist and bit me. I just need it looked at — maybe you should check her head, too.”

“Ah, Ms. Zhu,” the doctor said. “I should introduce myself. I’m Dr. Docter Dockter Doctor.”

I figured I must’ve hit my head harder than I thought, but then the doctor handed me her business card, which said the exact same thing. “Oh my god,” I said.

“My parents were very passive-aggressive. But enough about me. Let’s go to the back and look at these injuries — how long have you been out and about?” she asked me.

“An hour?”

“Jesus. I told Cyrus to bring you straight to the hospital. That boy’s too wrapped up in his own rules,” she tsked. “Can you tell me your full name?”

“Annette Mary Zhu.”

“Do you know who’s president?”

“I wish I didn’t.”

Doctor looked at me closely for a brief moment, her pupils twitching. “...Eh, I think you’re good.”

“...Oh. Okay.”

“What do you mean, ‘oh?’”

“Aren’t there scans you’re supposed to do?”

“In my professional opinion, I think you’ll be fine. But if you insist…”

Doctor stared directly at my forehead. Her pupils went huge, and started glowing white. I laughed nervously, feeling dizzy. “Hey, what the fuck?” I said to Juliet.

“Hold still, she’s scanning,” Juliet said, picking at her nails.

Doctor’s pupils stopped glowing and constricted to their normal size. “You’ve got a little blood in your skull, but it’s a very small amount. Give it time, and your brain will reabsorb it. Now let’s see what we can do about that arm.”

Doctor took us into the meat of the building. She had Juliet sit on a bed in the emergency room, and it was a normal emergency room — assuming you didn’t look too closely. There were about ten people writhing around with arrows sticking out of them, and a handful of tanned bottle blondes running around in scrubs. “Don’t some of these kids seem a little young to be doctors?” I whispered to Juliet as Doctor searched a drawer.

“They are, but the hospital’s real shorthanded. Mortal doctors can’t see half the injuries we get, and demigods rarely get medical degrees. Everyone who works here is either from Apollo, or uh… Asclepius, I think. One of the Paeans.”

“Oh.”

Doctor came back with a needle and thread. “Is that really necessary?” Juliet groaned.

“Yes, it is. Your friend here really did a number on you.”

“I’m not her friend,” I said quickly.

Juliet ignored me. “Whenever you’re ready, doc.”

Doctor started doctoring, as doctors do. She said to me, “your stepsisters are upstairs.”

“Huh?” I said.

“Vivian’s daughters. They’re upstairs,” she said, focusing more so on doctoring than what she was saying.

Juliet was cringing from Doctor sterilizing her bite wound. I said, “I’m going to go see them, I’ll be right back” and I guess she was too distracted to tell me otherwise.

I found a staircase and went to the hospital’s second floor. It was significantly quieter up there — lower priority cases. There were very few doctors, or even anybody pretending to be doctors. The people here were just licking their wounds.

The absence of medical staff upstairs was actually helpful. Rosalie and Genevieve in a sea of blondes would’ve been hay in a haystack. There was a distinct lack of curtains throughout the building, so one glance in the main room should’ve done the trick.

Except it didn’t. They had to be hiding somewhere.

The few kids in scrubs were busy, so I had trouble figuring out who to ask. A smell caught me off guard. I tilted my head back. Cotton candy?

A curly redhead a few years older than me came out of the staircase—she had a bouquet in her hand and a blue pen in her mouth, leaving a trail of sweet lies behind her. She was tall, athletic-looking, and her hair was cloudy-looking. A dark, impressive-looking trench coat hung off of her. I could tell she wasn’t in charge, but she seemed like she should be, you know?

My reverie was cut off by a candy striper shouting “YOU CAN’T VAPE IN HERE.”

I said, “hey, excuse me?” as she clicked her pen off.

She looked back and forth, then looked down at me. Her eyes were light blue. Very light. “Jeez, I didn’t see you there. What’s up?”

“I can’t find my stepsisters. You know if there’s any other rooms on this floor?”

The vape girl made a face and shrugged. “Uh… you’re car crash, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Down there,” she said, pointing at a door. “Isolation room.”

My eyebrows shot up. “Are they okay?”

“Don’t sweat it, they’re probably fine. They keep the new kids there.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” she said as I walked into the isolation room.

For once, Rosalie and Genevieve were lying in bed. It was a white room, a boring room. Good for a place engineered to keep someone from being instantly overwhelmed. They seemed fine — abnormally quiet, but I didn’t see any injuries.

I crept up to Rosalie and shook her gently. “Rosalie?” She was limp. “This isn’t funny. Rosalie.”

I did the same with Genevieve. Nothing.

The twins didn’t move, or show any signs of moving. I realized they were both hooked up to IV bags, feeding tubes, and heart monitors that beeped in near-harmony.

I tried every possible thing short of sticking them with needles, but they never responded.

“Well, fuck,” I said, sitting down on a bench. Is it bad that I never thought that I would  _ want _ to talk to my stepsisters?

I sat down and closed my eyes. Was the sight of the twins’ lifeless bodies upsetting? Yeah. But a quiet, empty room was exactly what I needed then.

After a fair bit of time, somebody walked in. “Hello, hello,” someone said in a soft, chalky voice. She didn’t sound like a candy striper. “Are you their family?”

“Uh, yeah.” I opened my eyes. “Who are you?”

The woman who’d come in was a short, swishy figure whose dark clothes floated around the room. I couldn’t pin down her age, and I wasn’t feeling rude enough to ask. Her red talons clutched at bags of beige nutrient slurry. “Miss Zhu, I assume,” she murmured. “I suppose you would like to know about their condition.”

She changed the topic so fast I didn’t realize she hadn’t answered the question. “Yeah. What’s wrong with them?”

The woman fiddled with the nearly-empty bags hooked up to the feeding tubes. “They haven’t woken up for quite some time. The doctors aren’t quite sure of the cause.”

“Can’t you funnel some of that yellow stuff into their throats?”

“They are mortal. Ingesting a half-teaspoon of ambrosia would be like inhaling a thousand part-per-million of carbon monoxide. ...They would die, is what I mean,” she added when she saw my confusion.

“Oh.” I noticed her phrasing. “You’re not a doctor.”

“No,” she said while changing the bags.

She stopped, like that explained everything, and wouldn’t respond to any other question.

I left and looked for Juliet. When I asked the receptionist where Doctor was, she told me “over there.” When I asked Doctor where Juliet was, she told me “outside.” Juliet was standing on the porch, calmly reading the file she’d stolen from Cyrus, and by the time I found her I’d forgot all about what I’d actually meant to ask her. Instead, I said this:

“Hey.”

“Hey!” she said.

I shivered. The temperature had dropped somewhat, they sky had gone eerily gray, and I was standing around in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. The shawl provided some protection, but not nearly enough. “Did it get colder out here?”

“I think it did.”

A few people came out of their buildings to peer at the clouds. The cool, dry wind billowed across the town like curtains, except it was wind. The rope in a nearby well swayed; I could hear the metal clank of the bucket hitting the sides. Dust blew in my mouth. I peered over Juliet’s shoulder. “What’s that say?”

Juliet peered over the file, skimming it. “Uh… Annette Zhu, blah blah blah, unknown parent — you know what, how about you just read it?” she said, handing me the folder.

INTAKE FORM

NAME:  Annette Zhu

AGE:  12

MORTAL PARENT:  Yan Zhu

DIVINE PARENT:  Unknown

FAMILY DETAILS:  Biological father, stepmother, two stepsisters

MIST STATUS:  Average vision

AMBROSIA:  No visible monoxide poisoning

MONSTER ENCOUNTERS:  Unknown, likely at least one

OFFENSIVE POWERS:  Unknown

NON-OFFENSIVE POWERS:  Unknown

WEAPONS:  One

EXPERIENCE:  None

ADDITIONAL NOTES:  Had no prior knowledge of her heritage. Possibly one of Hephaestus’s cronies? Probably too tiny for the forge. Needs some looking into.

“Good, great!” I said. “I hate it.”

Juliet raised her eyebrows. “You can’t hate a file! Them there’s facts.”

“Facts? This — this looks like you’re grasping at straws.” Frustration burned my throat.

“Annie, you’ve already seen all this shit. It’s not an elaborate ruse. Why are you still doubting this?”

I sputtered. “Why me? I think I got a damn good reason to ask it.”

Juliet took the file out of my hand. “By the looks of this, I’d say your dad is separated from your mom. You ever met your mom?”

“Well, no.”

“Then how do you  _ know? _ ” she said. “Annie, be honest with yourself. The food that Cyrus gave you — it’s what the gods eat. If you were normal, it would taste like burnt food. Then you’d die, because you ate a burning building’s worth of compressed smoke. Not a lot of explanations for that.”

“But I don’t have… I’m not some kind of superhero. I don’t have any  _ special powers. _ And there’s a fifty-fifty chance that my mother is actually dead in some crack den in  _ Alabama! _ ” I added. “Have you ever been to Alabama?”

Something I said must’ve struck a chord with Juliet, because that ramble seemed to upset her worse than outright assault had. “Yeah, well…” She pushed her hair back and took a deep breath, as if to say something intelligent — but a whiff of cotton candy floated past us. “Helena!”

The vape girl was walking out the hospital door, no bouquet, no vape, shivering. Her coat was gone, and the tank top underneath was labeled ‘everything hurts and I’m dying.’ She was staring at the sky, but not emptily. She was looking for something.

Juliet waved. I could’ve sworn she was blushing. “Hey, Helena!”

Helena looked towards us. “Hi, Juliet. Car crash,” she said, nodding to me. “I see you two met. Hope you’re not too confused.”

“I’m pretty confused,” I said.

“Understandable,” she chuckled.

Juliet laughed along nervously. “Annie, this is Helena.”

“Oh, we’ve met,” Helena said, gazing back into the horizon. Her blue eyes stared ahead as she tried to waft away the candy smell stuck to her clothes. “Something’s wrong with the air,” she said thoughtfully.

“It’s probably vape juice,” I said.

She frowned. “No. I would know if it were vape juice. I live and die in vape juice. This is north wind — cold north wind. It should be coming from the west, and it’s dry, so what’re those clouds doing up there? Makes no sense.”

I paused. “...Daughter of Zeus?” I said.

“Ding-ding-ding,” Helena muttered, shading her eyes from the little light still coming from the sun. “You guessed it.”

Meanwhile, Juliet looked like she was about to combust. “What are you doing here?” she blurted out.

“Huh?”

“Here — in — what brought you to the hospital, I mean!” she blabbered. Hoo boy, if Rosalie could see this. And she thought  _ I _ had a bad case of the doki’s.

If Helena picked up on this, she didn’t let it slip. “Oh, yeah. Slamlet broke his nose.”

“Oh, shit!” Juliet said, going pale. Is it healthy for blood to go to your face, and then leave it so fast? “Slamlet’s  _ here? _ ”

“ _ Slamlet? _ ” I said. “Who’s Slamlet?”

“Slamlet’s a big pain in the—”

A screaming like thunder came from inside the hospital:

HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

“FUCK,” Juliet said. Helena just walked away, shaking her curly head.

A nurse screamed at somebody to get back in bed, but was cut off by the thwack of metal hitting the floor. No time to dwell on that noise. A giant of a kid burst out of the hospital.

This was probably Slamlet. He had an obvious nose splint and a shaved head, but otherwise looked like a big Helena. His face was tomato-red, and there was a visible vein on his forehead.

Of course, I’m describing this guy after the fact. At the moment I couldn’t see any of this because he was charging right at me.

Slamlet stopped inches from my face. He stared. He turned to Juliet. “WHO’S THIS?”

“None of your business—!” Juliet shouted.

At that second, I knew I was at a crossroads. I said to myself, this is day one, I have a choice. I can lay low, which won’t be altogether pleasant, and I know that because I’ve laid low my whole life. Or I can fight. I might not win. I probably won’t win. But if I do win, nobody else will mess with me.

You know what they say.

When in Rome, kill the biggest guy in the yard to establish your dominance.

“I don’t know, who are you?” I said, cutting Juliet off.

Juliet looked confused. “I just told you that’s Slam—”

“No, I want to hear it from him,” I said.

Slamlet’s eyebrow went up into his hairline (?). His head acted like it was edited in from some particularly well-animated anime, that’s how fast he could rearrange his own face. If fortune so favored, he wouldn’t be rearranging mine. “I asked you FIRST.”

“I asked you second.”

Slamlet scoffed and jerked a thumb at his chest. “I am SLAMLET, son of ZEUS! I am one of his CHOSEN WARRIORS who are training in this town for WAR!”

“What war?”

“Uh…” He scratched his head. “I’ll get back to you on that one! Now who are YOU?”

“I’m Annie.”

“...AND?”

“That’s it, I just got here.” I sighed. “Look, are you the guy who beats up new kids or what?”

“YEE.”

I rolled up my sleeves and smiled. “Then come get some!”

“PUT ME DOWN PUT ME DOWN PUT ME DOWN.”

“Hey, g-guys, I’m back —  _ what happened?! _ ” Cyrus said.

Slamlet was holding me above his head.

Juliet took her phone out. “Annie’s getting slam dunked.”

Cyrus’s jaw dropped. “Already?”

“Yeah, she doesn’t fuck around. Oh, he’s throwing her down the water hole,” she said placidly.

Slamlet tried to drop me in the well, but I grabbed the edge and braced my shoes against the other side. He tried pushing. “WELL! WELL! WELL!” he chanted.

“ARE ANY OF YOU BASTARDS GONNA HELP ME?” I shouted at Juliet and Cyrus.

“Uh…” Cyrus stammered.

“You’ll be fine!” Juliet shouted, turning her phone camera on. “Try not to blink, I’m gonna take a still.”

“FUCK YOU.”

I looked over my shoulder. The bottom of the well was far away. Very far. All I could think was  _ no way in hell I’m falling in this well! _

I heard a faint sizzling noise. Slamlet paused for a moment and sniffed. “SOMETHING’S BURNING,” he declared.

I looked behind him. Juliet clapped her hand over her mouth and took another picture.

Slamlet screamed and dropped me down the well.

SPLOOSH.

I flailed in the water. “HELP! I CAN’T SWIM! I CAN’T SWIM—!”

My feet hit the bottom of the well. I stopped yelling. I stood up.

I could see over the edge a little. What I’d thought was a normal-sized well bottom very far down was actually a very narrow well bottom about five feet down.

“...Oh,” I said, watching Slamlet run around.

I stared at the scene uncomprehendingly for a good minute. There I was, standing in a shallow well. My dad was still missing. My stepmother was drunk. My stepsisters were in a coma. A guy who just tried to beat me up had spontaneously combusted. A boy I barely knew was frantically spanking the guy in a futile attempt to put him out. And the girl who’d ruined everything was putting it all on YouTube.

I kept watching. Cyrus’s spanking strategy worked, somehow, and the flaming inferno on Slamlet’s butt died to a smoking smoulder.

Slamlet fumed at everyone in the vicinity. Cyrus was wheezing too hard to formulate a response. Juliet ignored him, choosing to continue her smile. Everyone else stared at him like they were watching a trainwreck.

“WHAT’RE YOU GRINNING ABOUT,” he screamed. Cyrus squeaked and darted away. Juliet took a big step backward, but still grinned.

Slamlet stormed over to me. “This isn’t over,” he said menacingly. “I’ll get my revenge.”

He flounced away, into the hospital. Distantly, I heard: “PATRICIA! I NEED SOME  _ OINTMENT! _ ”


	7. Chiron Traumatizes Me Further, Somehow

I stared at the menu for a solid minute before Juliet offered to read it to me.

“I’m good,” I said. “Just tired.”

When he heard about Slamlet’s showdown with me, Chiron forced me, Cyrus and Juliet to reconvene. After hearing about the whole fiasco, he told Juliet to take me to the saloon and buy me dinner. (“What? What’d I do?” “I suppose the incident with the fury was not your fault, but you  _ did _ put her in a chokehold until she fainted.”)

Aside from a few weak protests, Juliet didn’t seem fussed. But because I focused hard on Chiron’s face, not his horsey bits, I noticed he seemed surprised by how easygoing she was. Cyrus seemed pretty shocked too, though he looked shocked so often his face could’ve been stuck like that. Either way I was curious.

When the group dissipated, I hung back.

“Are you coming?” Juliet had shouted at me from halfway down the road.

“Go ahead, I’ll catch up,” I called to her.

Cyrus looked at me like I was a rabid dog teetering in his direction. Can’t say I blame him. I hadn’t been the most mild-mannered girl lately. “Yo, Cyrus,” I said calmly. “What’s up with Juliet?”

Cyrus fidgeted with this weird little necktie thing he had. Was it an ascot? Whatever. “I think she likes you,” he admitted.

“What makes you think that?”

“She’s not normally this c-cordial with newcomers. Even when she’s the person who brought them here.”

“Then why’d she take a shine to  _ me? _ ”

He sighed and looked into the distance where Juliet was walking. “Um… I could just be spitballing, but I think she’s jealous.”

“...Jealous?” I looked over myself. What could she be jealous of?

“Eh, not you. Everyone else. All the time, she’s surrounded by people who — even if they’re constantly getting jumped by monsters, at least they have some power that can repel them. She doesn’t, uh, have any.”

“What do you mean?”

Cyrus sucked in air through his teeth. “We know she’s a demigod because she passed all the tests, but… otherwise, there’s nothing. She doesn’t have any powers. The gods say they don’t know whose kid she is. And, um, it’s been three years without any word.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“So she likes me because we both suck.”

“Yeah.”

“That was the longest I ever heard you talk without stuttering.”

Cyrus sighed and waved me away. “Give it a minute.”

But back to the saloon.

The saloon Vivian was meant to manage, Dio’s, was still open for business. Technically, the town has two saloons: the Olympahoma Inn, a sanitized theme-park setup. The floors are clean, there’s a set schedule for tourist attractions, and what little alcohol is served is historically-inaccurate swill. Then we have Dio’s.

Dio’s is basically a western saloon on LSD. If you’re Misted, you might think that you’re just in a particularly lawless Oklahoma bar, but I wasn’t. There were satyrs screaming “CHUG CHUG CHUG” at a couple of friends shotgunning beers. Underaged kids were barfing in the corners. And, of course, we can’t forget the giant stuffed and mounted lizard head on the wall, scaly mouth open, exposing hundreds of needlelike teeth.

The list of drinks was really high on the wall. “I can read it to you,” Juliet said.

“I’m good, just tired.”

“Did you lose your glasses or something?”

“I don’t need glasses.”

“So you just squint at stuff for fun?”

I ignored that remark. “This is the bar Vivian’s supposed to be running.”

“Yeah.”

“So if she’s not running it, why’s it still open?”

“It needs to be open,” she said, sitting on a bar stool. “It’s Dionysus’s sacred saloon. If we close it down, we’ll be in trouble.” She patted the stool next to her.

I sat down. “Why?”

“Well, Dionysus is this town’s protector. There’s a lot of towns like this, and each town has an Olympian god protecting it. Ours used to be Athena, but that was before 1879.” A bartender with straight yellow hair approached us. “Two kykeon, please,” Juliet asked.

“I should pay for that,” I said. “I’ve caused enough trouble.”

“It’s on me. Besides, what would you pay with?” Juliet produced a few bronze disks the size of sugar cookies from her skirt and slid them across the bar. The bartender sniffed them, then put them in the cash register.

“I hope Cyrus is getting home safe. It’s almost dark, something could jump him,” I said.

Juliet made a face like she’d licked a lemon. “Cyrus is mighty powerful, he can look after himself. It’s his fellow goodbloods I’d worry about.”

I hoped kykeon didn’t have alcohol in it. We were almost a decade underage.

“What’s a goodblood?”

“You’re a goodblood. Or rather, a god’s blood,” Juliet said, spinning her stool. “Hey, this one spins! Whee!”

“Focus, man, you’re supposed to exposit me.”

“Demigods in America, we used to call ourselves ‘godsblood,’ because we’re from a god’s bloodline. It eventually turned into ‘goodblood.’ Good thing too. We can’t say stuff like godsblood without people looking at us weird.”

The bartender had turned away and was preparing whatever it was Juliet had paid for. I didn’t pay much attention until I saw her rip out a handful of her hair and put it on the counter. “Is she supposed to do that?” I whispered.

“Oh, it’s fine, she’s a nymph,” Juliet said. I squinted at her hair. Now that I really looked, it was sticking out in all directions, like a grain plant. It was also growing back so fast I could see it pop out of her head. “She’s probably out of scotch barley.”

The bartender shook something into both drinks and gave them to us. “Thanks, Eudokia,” Juliet said.

I sniffed the drink curiously. “This is box wine with some parmesan floating in it.”

“Yeah it is,” Juliet said, slurping it up.

I grimaced. “That’s disgusting. I’m going home.”

“You do you, buddy.”

I walked around town for a while, trying to figure out what to do. It was getting dark. I knew my family was moving into town, but I wasn’t sure where our house was.

I walked back to the Fauntleroy. My banjo was still lying in the dust at the building’s side, so I picked it up. I needed to get a strap or something for this thing. Then something caught my eye.

There were weird sparks of white light coming from the back. Going back there without backup would be dumb — if it were a monster — but if I ran all the way back to Dio’s it would be too late, and I didn’t know where Cyrus was. Besides, I couldn’t figure what monster flashed like that.

I peeked around the corner. It was Helena.

She had a bow in her left hand, and an arrow (?) in her right. Except the arrow wasn’t an arrow, it was a beam of light that I thought was a fluorescent light bulb before I noticed it was moving.

I had my mouth open to say “hello,” but I shut it. Best to not startle somebody with a lightning bolt in their hand.

Helena had one eye closed to see the target better, which was already scorched in several places.

The bolt hit just one ring away from the middle.

“Nice shot,” I said.

Helena wasn’t surprised. “Hello, Annie,” she said, walking to the target and pulling out the lightning bolt. She twirled it in her hand. “Are you a good shot?”

“No.” I didn’t have to guess. At school, we’d briefly had archery, and I learned that my upper body strength was rotten. The bow I’d been using was strung for a middle schooler. Helena was jacked, so hers had to be tighter.

“Let me see.” The bolt evaporated in her hand. She handed me her bow and took a wooden arrow from her quiver. The bow was as tall as I was.

I notched the arrow, but could barely pull the string back. It landed in the dirt an arm’s length away.

“Eh. Everybody starts somewhere,” Helena said.

“I’ll say.”

She plucked the arrow out of the ground. “But I doubt you came out here to watch me shoot.”

“Chiron walked my stepmother home earlier. Do you know where that is?”

“Not personally, but I believe Sister Ernestine knows.”

“Sister Ernestine?”

“The prophetess. She knows everything in these parts.” She straightened her coat lapels and her quiver, putting the arrow back. “Though god knows where the snake’s slithered off to. She’s supposed to be in the temple, but she’s always away when you need her.”

“Where would you hide a temple in a desert?” I muttered to myself.

“That’s a good question,” Helena said.

She walked away silently. I stood there for an embarrassingly long time before realizing I was meant to follow.

Helena lead me off into the desert. Not terribly far, but a fair bit away from town. The light of Dio’s burned quietly on the horizon. “Are we supposed to be out here?” I said uneasily. Dad’s talk of coyotes and wolves in the Oklahoma wild hadn’t spooked me at the time, but now it was starting to gain relevance.

“I’m not going anywhere nobody’s been before,” Helena said. “If it were light out, you might see where the dirt’s been tamped down here.”

I couldn’t see much of anything. The dim light showed me a sterile desert, no cacti or nothing, and a jagged arrangement of rocks in the distance — which was what we were walking towards. I tilted my head. “That hill looks like—”

“Keanu Reeves?”

“I was going to say Jeff Goldblum.”

“Everyone has a different opinion.”

There was a small gap in the hill, which looked like an abandoned mine, with the wood framing and such. A metal sign nearby was illegible, but it looked like some form of “KEEP OUT.” Helena walked in without a second thought. I glanced at the sign, trying to read, but gave up in order to keep pace.

You would think that all long, dark corridors would echo, but not always. Ernestine’s mineshaft was strangely quiet for reasons I never puzzled out. I had to track Helena by the scent of residual vape juice, which is as unappealing as it sounds — especially since there were other smells in there. Cold, wet smells. And oddly, tea.

All of a sudden, Helena shouted “ERN-ES- _ TINE! _ ”

I jumped. A powdery, muffled voice up ahead answered her. “Ye-es, what do you want?”

“Turn on the damn lights!”

Sister Ernestine huffed quietly. “Alright, you don’t have to shout...”

Something clicked distantly, and the mineshaft lit up with string lights. The tunnel was much lower than I had assumed, to the point where Helena was leaning over as to not hit her head on the ceiling.

A door to the side of the shaft opened, and a tiny woman shuffled out, wearing a bathrobe and slippers. The smell of tea wafted out strongly. “Oh, hey,” I said. “We’ve met before. In the hospital.”

“Ye-es,” Sister Ernestine drawled. She sounded the way you expect an elderly witch to sound — high-pitched, cackling, cluck-like. “I believe we have, child. Now, it’s near sundown. May be wise to hurry up and ask your question. You know what lives in these sands at night.”

I didn’t, but I felt that I had an idea.

Helena rolled her eyes. I couldn’t figure why she disliked the sister so much. “Annie would like to know where her parents are staying tonight.”

I nodded. Sister Ernestine tapped her chin thoughtfully. “In an apartment above Dio’s. 8A. Helena will walk you home and you’ll let yourself in.”

“I don’t have a key,” I said.

Sister Ernestine paused. “Well, of course, I… I know that. And if Mrs. Zhu is still drunk asleep — which she is — she’s not going to answer the door...” She shuffled through her door.

I stood there, unsure what to do.

Sister Ernestine stuck her pointy hand out of the doorway. “C’mere!”

Helena, though still unhappy, made a “go on” gesture. I went into the door.

Somehow, in this mineshaft, there was a functioning house. The door I walked into led to a kitchen not out of place in a grandma’s house. There was a cup of tea sitting on her table, and a few medicine bottles. Sister Ernestine was banging around in her drawers, looking everywhere short of under the fridge for something. I couldn’t help but feel like I’d interrupted her.

“Should I help—?”

“No, no,” Sister Ernestine said. “It’s my problem. Terrible at organizing, I am. I lose things so often one day it’s going to kill me!”

I looked over the medicine bottles. Aspirin, riboflavin, acepromazine, strychnine, epitol. If losing things didn’t kill her, liver failure would. Finally, after looking everywhere short of under the fridge, Sister Ernestine produced results. “Got it!”

She dropped a heavy iron key in my hand. I raised my eyebrows. “Do you keep people’s house keys just lying around?”

She shook her head. “Nonsense, dearie. That’s a skeleton key. Got it off some pesky Romans a few years back. It’ll get you in any door you need.” She patted me on the shoulder.

“Thank you.”

“No problem,” she said. “I wish those sisters of yours a speedy recovery.”

I walked in the apartment door and immediately fell asleep on the couch without noticing my surroundings.

What? I was tired. Sue me.

I was back in the Mobile Museum of Art. It was near the exhibit that I got stabbed in, except I wasn’t. Stabbed, I mean. Not at the moment.

The museum was closed, so it was dark. A janitor wheeled his cart past me, shining a flashlight.

I followed the janitor.

I hadn’t been back in the museum since I was attacked. It was just as weird as I remember, except now it was darker and considerably spookier.

The janitor mopped lethargically, and I trailed behind him. I wasn’t conscious of the decision. I was just doing dream things, as you do. If I were a little more lucid, I probably wouldn’t have done something that stupid.

Once I got over the fact that I was in the museum after dark, there wasn’t much to see. Just a dark room and a janitor janitoring.

I got bored and decided to wander ahead.

The exhibit has no doors, just one continuous chamber. That’s got to be terrible for the heating bill.

I stayed only a few paces ahead of the janitor. With my newfound circumstances, I had an altogether different feeling about being alone in a room full of monsters, even if they were just statues.

I was having all the wrong thoughts. Instead of thinking of good questions like “why am I here” or “why can’t the janitor see me” I was actually trying to read the placards under the art and failing, because not only is my reading bad in real life, but apparently my dream self has some shit vision too.

Eventually I passed the time waving at security cameras.

I wanted to say “hi,” but my mouth was full of cotton. I spotted one in the corner ahead of the janitor and ran ahead. “Hewwo,” I slurred, flapping my arm. “Hewwo.”

Yeah, go on and laugh.

My joy was short-lived, as I slipped and landed on my ass.

It didn’t hurt, but it was a terrible inconvenience.

I realized I was covered in a fine white ash.

Under me, there was a circle of deeply scorched floor that extended several yards in every direction. And on the wall in front of me, there was an outline of a seven foot tall man.

There was Polyphemus, staring at me with his one stone eye. The janitor ignored it all and mopped.

Distantly, there was a knocking noise.

I turned around. Where the ash outline on the wall had been, there was a door.

The janitor was gone. It was just me and the door, which was ten feet high but otherwise a normal paneled door.

_ knock knock knock _

It was a quiet, but unmistakable knock at the door.

“You should get that,” a girl whispered in my ear. “Your father’s waiting for you.”

The girl—

I woke up.

_ knock knock knock _

I turned on a lamp.

I made eye contact with the centaur who was in the midst of a very passionate kiss.

I looked at the horse on the receiving end.

They both froze.

“This is... not my house,” I said.

I turned off the lamp.


	8. And That's All I Wrote

I had to pass through Dio’s to leave the apartment. Once I was there I went back to Juliet, who was still there, as well as the cheese drink I’d declined.

“Can I still have this?” I asked her.

“Yeah,” Juliet said.

I chugged the whole thing. “God! That’s  _ so gross! _ ” I whispered as I stormed out of the building with my sword out.

As to  _ why _ I had that sword, I didn’t get much info on what apparently lurks in the desert after dark, but I didn’t want to find out. I figured, if I run fast enough nothing will catch me — including the cold.

I ran screaming, waving the sword around like a maniac.

I went up the boarding house’s steps, went to knock on the door, and found myself knocking on Cyrus’s shirt. “How’d you know I was here?” I said.

He looked at me, then he looked at the sword. “You were running around screaming in the middle of night.”

“Yeah that’s fair. Let me in.”

Cyrus stepped by. “It’s good that you’re here. I, uh, have something you might find interesting.”

“Could you be more specific? Last time a boy told me that he showed me his penis.”

“What? No. What?” Cyrus shook his head. “No, I’m showing you something else. C’mere.”

Cyrus took me back to the room where I woke up. He moved the rug, revealing a trapdoor in the floor. He took a shoehorn off the mantle — because the door had no handle — and pried it up. He went down the ladder into a dark hole.

This seemed suspiciously murderous. “Are you coming?” he said.

“Yeh,” I mumbled, trying to talk while going down a ladder with a sword between my teeth.

I went down into complete darkness. At least, until Cyrus hit the lights.

“Holy shit, that’s a lot of junk,” I said.

Wall-to-wall shelves, all of them full of strange and unusual things. Lots of crazy weapons, armor pieces, and a few preserved monster bits. “You’d do well not to call it junk,” Cyrus said. “These things are gifts from the gods. Literally. We’ve, uh, collected quite a few over the years.”

I was so busy ogling the weird stuff I didn’t notice that Cyrus had opened a door. “It’s in here!” he said.

Cyrus took me into a side room off of his basement.  _ Never a good thing to have. _

This room was similar to the basement, except it was full of boxes of paperwork. Cyrus already had a fat box sitting on the floor. “This is in character for you, but honestly? I’d rather see your penis.”

“Oh, shush, you’ll want to hear this,” he said, closing and locking the door. Also a bad sign. He whispered, “I think I know why the, uh…  _ venerable ones _ attacked you.”

“The what?”

“You know.” He dropped his voice. “Furries.”

“Fur—?”

“Don’t say it out loud! You’ll get their attention.”

“Juliet said it and she’s fine.”

“Juliet’s an idiot,” he said while rummaging through the box on the floor.

He handed me a few pictures. The first one was a grab from black and white security footage. It wasn’t very high-quality, but I could clearly see a blur of a man running through an airport. Behind him, something was running — on all fours, with a black body and a white head. “I printed this out from a news website based in Florida. This guy’s name was Mike Greenwood.”

“Past tense, huh?”

“Yeah, he’s  _ super  _ dead,” he said, giving me a print-out of an article titled “NAKED FLORIDA MAN FOUND DISEMBOWELED, CASTRATED ON AIRPORT TARMAC.” He had this paragraph highlighted.

Greenwood was accompanied by an unidentified woman who TSA agents took aside after she failed to pass the metal detector. The woman left to use the restroom and has not been seen since.

Cyrus gave me another picture. This one was a zoomed-in security picture of a woman with blonde hair and a flowing dress. A floppy sunhat obscured her face. “I’m ninety percent sure this woman’s Persephone. This picture was taken in March, so she would’ve been on the trip between the Underworld and Demeter’s farm. I’m less sure of what actually happened — maybe Mike tried, uh, mugging her. But whatever he did, it fell in the category of a crime against his elders.” He pointed to the blur in the picture. “One of four ways to get their attention. Other three are crimes of children to parents, hosts to guests, and government officials to citizens.”

“What do you think I did?”

“I don’t... know. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. You’re a twelve year old girl that the gods couldn’t care less about.”

“Wow, thanks.”

“That’s a good thing.” Cyrus took out another folder full of paper. “The venerable ones were only seen in town one other time, and it was a hundred years ago.”

Cyrus showed me a photocopy he made of a browning antique photo. A couple of rich people were sitting for a portrait. Their faces were made fuzzy by age, but they were clearly decked out. The man had a lacquered cane like the one Vivian had given my dad, and the woman was wearing so much makeup I could barely make out her face. “Manasses Fauntleroy, late mayor of Olympahoma — or Delphi Lake, as it was called in those days.” He tapped the woman. “And his mistress. So we’ve got to talk about Angry Mob Day.”

I vaguely remembered reading about it in the pamphlet. “That’s when you guys build a big fort and burn it down with all the torches and the pitchforks.”

“Yeah. Manasses is why we have an Angry Mob Day.”

“Yikes, what happened?”

“Prior to 1879, Athena was the guardian of Delphi Lake. We were tasked with keeping one of her sacred objects safe. The Necklace of Harmonia.”

He paused for dramatic effect. I tried blinking “I DON’T GET IT” at him in Morse code.

“Sorry, I forget you’re new to this. The Necklace of Harmonia makes the wearer ageless, but unlucky. Harmonia got turned into a snake and the effects just got uglier from there. Even after we destroyed it, its freakish bad luck aura is still clinging to the town.”

“Wait, slow down.”

“Okay, so…” Cyrus scratched his head. “Manasses was mayor. We, um, didn’t like him very much because he was an asshole, and because he was a mortal. Not only did he not understand the gods, he flat-out didn’t believe they were real. So one day, he and his mistress walked into the temple of Delphi and she said, ‘hey, I want that necklace.’ He tried to buy it. We told him it wasn’t for sale. He took it anyway. Athena got pissed. She called it a crime.”

“So the furries formed an angry mob?”

“Uh, no. We beat them to it.”

I stared at him. “Athena was the goddess of this town, right? ...Isn’t Athena  _ the smart one? _ ”

Cyrus glanced away guiltily. “Yeah, well. She figured her wisdom would trickle down to us.”

“And how’d that work out?”

“We burned Manasses’ house with him, his mistress, and all his possessions inside.”

“That destroyed the necklace?”

“Well, we didn’t  _ see _ it after that. In my opinion, good riddance. But Athena didn’t think the same, because it was one of her sacred artifacts, and she cursed our river to run dry. Dionysus picked us up soon after because he liked our whiskey.”

“And that was it?”

“That was it.”

I laid down on the floor. “You don’t have  _ anything _ that can help me find my dad?”

“Not yet,” Cyrus said quietly.

“What?”

“What?”

“What do you mean,  _ not yet? _ ” I demanded.

He inhaled sharply. “Rhody Rivers and Creepy Dave are coming to town. They’re going to meet up with Helena Honeycutt. Rhody and Helena are… pretty much the dream team of Greek heroes. If they can’t find your dad, nobody can.”

“You call one of the most powerful heroes in the country  _ Creepy Dave? _ ”

“He calls _ himself _ that!” Cyrus said defensively. “And he  _ is _ creepy. Juliet can introduce you to them tomorrow.”

“I’ve already met Helena. She seems cool. Is that seriously her last name?”

“Yes, seriously.”

“My god, she sounds like a Strawberry Shortcake character. Wait — Slamlet’s her brother, right? Is his last name Honeycutt too?”

“I would assume.”

I laughed. “Slamlet Honeycutt!”

“But, uh... that’s not the point… are you okay?” Cyrus said as I doubled over.

“Haha! Haha! No!” I said. “This is  _ so fucking weird. _ ”

“You get used to it,” Cyrus sighed.

I dreamed about snakes at the boarding house. Until I heard a knock.

I rolled over, thinking it was part of the dream, but then there was a muffled voice: “Get in loser, we’re going mobbing!”

When I opened my eyes, I saw Juliet’s face pressed flat against the window next to me. The glass squeaked as her lipstick smeared on it. “Why are you like this?” I said.

“Come on, I’m trying to make you feel better,” Juliet said, mouth squeaking against the glass. “Rhody’ll have your dad back in no time, but I’d like you to meet him first. He’ll be in the mob with everyone else.”

“No, Juliet.”

“Pwease?” she said, pressing her face harder against the glass.

I tried really hard to not look at her, but honestly, try  _ not _ looking at somebody pressing their face against glass. It’s basically impossible. “Fine,” I said. “But go easy, we’re both injured.”

“Yeah!” Juliet backed away from the window. “Now open this puppy up.”

I opened the window, realizing too late that we were on the second floor. Juliet had somehow gotten onto a balcony that she shouldn’t have been able to reach from the ground. “How’d you get up here?”

“Climbed,” she said simply.

“How am I supposed to get down?”

“Climb,” she said simply, as she already started going down.

Juliet didn’t explain anything, so I was stuck trying to get down from the boarding house’s second floor myself. I had to jump over the railing, dangle from the second floor balcony, grab part of a support beam, balance on the porch railing, and then jump onto the porch.

She was clapping by the time I got down and I wanted to punch her.

“You climbed that all by yourself!” she said proudly. “You’re more teachable than I was when I got here!”

I scowled at her. She took me by the hand and started walking into the desert.

I reckoned the desert was the most common place for anyone in this town to hide anything. I assumed the same force that hid the magic in town hid the magic in the desert — except in the desert, it might’ve been stronger. It was the only way I could rationalize the massive amount of crap they’d managed to hide in the salt flats.

I still couldn’t see the alleged path of tamped dirt Helena had talked about earlier. Maybe I  _ do _ need glasses, I contended to myself, but I will  _ never _ admit that to Juliet.

Juliet was smiling, and her curls bounced as she walked. I think I’ve only ever seen Juliet frown once, and yet she expresses almost a full range of emotion with ease. And yet there  _ I  _ was, running out of ways to convey my anger. “It’s going to be a long walk,” she said calmly. “You can’t make that face forever.”

I scowled harder.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, I know,” I snapped. “…Ugh, I’m sorry too, for being a jerk. I haven’t been feeling myself since I got here.”

“That’s fine. It happens. People get upset when they first hear about the gods and stuff. Some kind of existential crisis.”

I shook my head, trying to cool off. Ever stood in the sun with black hair? You know what I’m talking about. “I just wish I understood what’s going on. It’s like everyone knows what they’re doing except me.”

“Oh, we don’t, we’re just trying to have fun before we die.”

I laughed. Juliet didn’t.

“…Okay. Since you’re lipstick-deep in my personal life, is it okay for me to ask about yours?”

“Oh, definitely.”

“When I met you, you said you were going to Olympahoma to stay with your uncle because something was wrong in your hometown. But that doesn’t add up. You’ve been here for three years, apparently.”

“Yeah, I’ve been here since I was nine.”

“Who are your parents?”

She shrugged. “Heck if I know.”

“It seems standard to have at least one.”

“Legally, Cyrus is my brother, because his dad adopted me. I have a mortal father, but he doesn’t live here.” She sucked in air through her teeth. “I’ve ruled out Demeter and Mania and all the male gods. Next one on my list is Aphrodite, because she can look like anything, but she’s notoriously hard to get ahold of.”

I thought back to my discussion with Cyrus. “What about Athena?”

Juliet blinked. “Annie, Athena’s black. Unless she’s deep undercover, she’s always black.”

“Oh. I didn’t know.”

“I wouldn’t want to be one of Athena’s egghead kids, anyway. I like being Cyrus’s figurative sister more than being his literal sister. What, surprised?” she said, looking at me. “Have you seen the junk he hoards in his basement? He’ll save anything because he wants to study a damn pattern. Not everything’s here for a reason.”

“Well…”

“Oh my god, don’t tell me you’re a Christian.”

“No? Is there something wrong with Christians?”

“…” Juliet didn’t know how to respond to that one.

“I don’t have a mom either. Who do you think she is?” I asked.

“With your skin tone, not Athena. Is your dad gay?”

“No.”

“Have you checked?”

“…No?”

“Gods can get pregnant if they want to, Annie.”

“Wow, okay. Add that to the list of things I didn’t need to know.”

“Oh, come on. Aphrodite sprouted from a severed nutsack, and  _ this _ is too much?”

“…”

“Anyway. Cyrus says you might be Hephaestus’s daughter, because you heal faster when you’re near fire. Are you good at science?”

“I’m good at chemistry.”

“Like, engineering, though. Building and fixing things.”

“Oh, no.”

“Art?”

“Nope.”

“Then I’m at a loss.” Juliet looked at the encroaching building in the distance and whistled. “Wow. Speaking of the Hephaestus kids, they’ve really outdone themselves this year.”

The four-story wooden building was remarkably sturdy looking. It towered over the heads of the gathered crowd looking on, and a few orderlies let certain people inside. A metal barrier kept the mob from the mansion. Tourists watched from a further distance, eating their funions and soft pretzels.

Everyone I had ever  _ met _ was there. Chiron and Cyrus were waving their clipboards. Billy Joe satyr was off to the side, trying to keep Vivian from falling into a puddle of her own vomit. A big drum of gasoline was being carried around, and I couldn’t see its carrier, but it was probably Slamlet. Dr. Doctor was eating her lunch in the back of a parked ambulance. Helena was in the doorway of the mansion, dolled up in a big dress, and she was talking to some dude in a waistcoat I’d never seen before.

“Come on!” Juliet said.

“Are we allowed in there?”

“No,” she said, jumping over the barrier.

I awkwardly teetered over the same barrier. Why did God, or Zeus or whatever, make me with such short legs? Juliet was chattering with Helena and her dude, and she pointed at me enthusiastically. When I could approach, the dude was smiling.

“So you’re Annie!” he said. Encouragingly, not condescendingly. There was a trace of Brooklyn accent in his voice. “Welcome to the big fat Greek world. Sorry that your introduction is, you know, like  _ this _ .”

Rhody was a whole lot of dude. Like, damn. Wow. Just, holy shit.

Uh, sorry, let me give you a real description.

Rhody was this tall, dark, and handsome guy. He was also the only person I’d ever seen who could make a Hawaiian shirt look tasteful, as I’d later learn. But since he was wearing fancy period clothing, the feeling that he was out of my league was tripled. Just imagine the most beautiful man possible and that’s Rhody. Which is totally unfair.

“I’m okay,” I said. “Well, no I’m not. I’ve quit panicking ‘cause I’m tired.”

“You’re delightful,” Juliet said, patting me on the head. “Let me tell you about Angry Mob Day.”

From the tourists’ perspective, Angry Mob Day is a historical reenactment of the day the townspeople overthrew the corrupt mayor in 1879. But that’s  _ after _ the Mist overwrites their eyes and ears.

For the rest of us, Angry Mob Day is the day we split into two teams and try to beat the shit out of each other. The more powerful minority put on fancy clothes and defend the mansion. Everyone else — which is a few hundred people — rush the mansion with guns and pitchforks.

You’re thinking that’s an unfair battle, right? You’re thinking wrong.

“We’ll be in the mob with everyone else,” Juliet said, sounding a little disgruntled, which I took to mean super fucking disgruntled. “Not that I’m  _ complaining, _ it’s good stuff even when you’re in the mob. Helena threw a severed arm off the balcony last year and I caught it.”

I looked up. The mansion seemed to sway in the wind. “Is that thing safe?”

“The swaying’s good,” Rhody said. “I’d be more worried if it didn’t sway. That hunk of junk’s gotta withstand worse wind than that, right, Helena?”

Helena stared at a point of space far into the horizon.

“Helena?”

She snapped out of it. “Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.”

“What’s going on?”

“It’s nothing.”

“You sure? …You don’t have  _ vape poisoning _ , do you?” Rhody’s expression went from one of concern to the smug look of a man who thought he was winning an argument. “I told you—”

“For the love of god, Rhody, vape poisoning isn’t a thing.”

“Come on. This, still?”

“This forever! I once smoked up for so long my vape pen gave birth to a cloud nymph! If I don’t get vape poisoning after  _ that _ , I never will!”


End file.
